The Irrational Season

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  Tallis used to talk about the academic problem of what a priest ought to do if a pious Turk came up to take communion. And one day he was celebrating Mass and a man whom he knew to be a pious Turk did indeed appear at the altar rail. And was given the body and blood. And was there because he had read the Book of Common Prayer and taken seriously all that it had said. And became a far better Christian than most of us born to it. What might have happened had the letter of the law been obeyed and he turned down?

  Perhaps we will once again be One when all the hungry sheep have broken down and leapt over the denominational barriers in order to be nourished together, and ultimately the Hierarchies will recognize that unity is already here, and can throw away all thouse millions of miles of red tape.

  When I contemplate the problems of intercommunion, especially Roman Catholic/Anglican/Orthodox vis-à-vis those who do not believe in the Real Presence, it occurs to me that these genuine problems about the Lord’s Table are once again problems of our own making. If those who are terrified at the idea of the Real Presence in the bread and wine, those who shudderingly call it cannibalism (but we are all in one way or another cannibals; we do nourish each other; all life lives at the expense of other life), if those who staunchly assert that their communion services are purely memorial services—well, then, if they really remember, in the fullest sense of anamnesis, the problem becomes a semantic one. If the mighty acts of God are truly present, then it is human beings who create divisions among each other. It is our nature to do so, but at least we are coming more to realize how futile and wasteful is a divided Christendom, and how we ourselves, far more than those outside the Church, are willfully slowing down the coming of the Kingdom.

  Of course anamnesis doesn’t always happen during a service, not in any communion or denomination, just as it does not always happen when I am writing. Tallis told me about an Orthodox attitude which I love; it is also enlightening! During an Orthodox service (and these are longer than those we complain about as being too long) no one worshipper there is able to concentrate on what is going on, to exercise anamnesis, at all times. Our minds do wander. During even the most moving of church services, I constantly have to pull my thoughts back into focus. But the Orthodox feel that this does not matter, because all of the time some one is concentrating; there is always someone in the Body who is wholly focused on the Holy Mysteries; there is always someone keeping the strong rope of anamnesis unbroken, and so my belief in interdependence deepens, and my wayward heart is turned toward God, God who is One, who is All, and who must be saddened and perhaps amused by all the theological problems we continually manage to create for ourselves.

  My tongue has been informed by Anglican thought; my favorite century of English literature is from the mid-sixteen-hundreds to the mid-seventeen-hundreds, and all the literary masters I look up to speak with Anglican voices. I was born an Anglican, and even if I left the Church forever, just as once Hugh left the theatre forever, that tradition flows in my very bloodstream.

  I am grateful for our Crosswicks years in the Congregational Church, when Hugh was a deacon and lay preacher, when I directed choir and taught the high-school discussion group. I learned a lot about the priesthood of all believers which is still important to me. So I go to church, not for any legalistic or moralistic reasons, but because I am a hungry sheep who needs to be fed; and for the same reason that I wear a wedding ring: a public witness of a private commitment.

  There was one Pentecost Sunday in our village church which I am not likely to forget. I wrote about it later, for some of the young people involved who are close to me:

  It is an old church,

  two hundred years old,

  and that is old for this gawky country though perhaps young by other standards.

  The congregation today (as in most churches)

  is sparse.

  In the old New England tradition

  we amble into our seats

  and only a few outsiders

  indulge in the impropriety and popery

  of bowing their heads in prayer

  (nobody would dare kneel).

  So of course nobody remembers that this is

  the time of the rushing wind and the tongues of fire.

  Today is the Sunday when the Young People’s Group,

  the Pilgrim Fellowship, is going to lead the worship.

  They are dressed in jeans, shirts—

  the girls as well as the boys—

  and someone puts on a record

  and in the chancel they dance to the music

  separately

  (nobody touches anybody else)

  and not very well. But it is Their Own Thing,

  their response:

  two women get up and leave the church.

  Then one of the girls goes to the lectern (she brought me a kitten once)

  and tells us that they are not there to shock us

  but to tell us what is on their minds.

  Another girl talks about the importance of individualism;

  what she really means is that she cares

  about the fall of the sparrow

  and the gloriously unutterable value of persons.

  But somebody else walks out.

  Then a boy (his mother and I were pregnant

  together with our sons; I have seen him

  learn to walk and talk)

  gets up and says he does not believe in God

  or life after death

  or anything he’s been taught in Sunday School.

  If there is a God, he says,

  we have to find him where we live,

  and he finds church when he walks alone

  in the woods.

  There is a movement in the back of the church

  as someone else leaves.

  Then our nearest neighbors’ boy,

  our son’s close friend,

  talking too fast in his urgency,

  cries out against war

  and napalm

  and job recruiters for Dow Chemical

  and killing killing killing

  and more people walk out.

  Then the young people (still trying) come to

  pass the Peace

  and they put on another record and sing to it

  and they CARE

  And someone else leaves

  oh stop

  oh stop

  STOP

  This is Pentecost

  the wind is blowing

  the flames are bright

  the Spirit burns

  O stop

  listen

  all you Parthians, Medes, Elamites,

  dwellers in Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia.

  in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt

  and in the parts of Libya around Cyrene,

  O stop

  strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and

  Arabians, dwellers in New England, New York,

  Indiana, India, California, Chile,

  China, Russia, Africa.

  Stop and listen

  to these children who speak in your own tongue

  the wonderful works of God.

  But the tongue is dulled, the whisper blurred. We do not listen to each other. We are more often known by how we quarrel than by how we love each other. I had a horrendous picture of the face we present to the world when I was asked to be the lay Christian on the panel of Christians and Jews where I met the rabbi who performed Peter’s mother’s funeral.

  But the rabbi and I did not become friends that first night. Fortunately it was an ongoing panel, because the first evening was as full of misunderstanding and refusal to listen as that Pentecost Sunday in the Congregational Church. My job, at that initial meeting, was to respond to a keynote speech by a visiting rabbi who had done some work with the World Council of Churches and who had therefore been brought in to lead the discussion.

  He talked more about Christianity than he did about Judaism, but the Christ
ianity he held up to the congregation bore no relationship whatsoever to any kind of Christianity I can believe in. But where, where did he get his picture of Christianity? From Christians, that’s where. I listened with growing horror. There was nothing I could respond to. Certain words meant one thing to him, another to me, so that it was as though we spoke foreign languages—and the Holy Spirit did not come that first evening to touch our tongues so that we would understand each other. It was an evening of confusion and, on occasion, hostility toward me and the young priest friend who had got me into this—hostility because we represented to the gathered assembly everything the rabbi was saying about Christians.

  At the depressing end of the evening I asked if I might be given ten minutes at the beginning of the next session to say something about what Christianity means to me, and was told that I might. Ten minutes to tell a hostile congregation what the Incarnation means to my life! Impossible, of course. All I could do was to try to speak completely honestly, completely vulnerably. I spent all week trying to choose the few words I could use in ten minutes. I was certainly earnest, and perhaps the very earnestness was what broke the ice, because after that we were able to talk to each other as human beings created by the One same God.

  Then we were able to start untangling some of the misconceptions. It’s easy enough to respond to “All Christians blame the Jews for killing Jesus, and they’re still making us pay for it.” We talked about the Palm Sunday service at the Cathedral, and the moment that the ‘we’ or ‘us’ becomes ‘they’ or ‘them,’ we are no longer Christian.

  But there were other, subtler misconceptions, and they have been set up by Western Christianity as it has attempted to conform to this world—not to accept it, to be in it, but to conform to it. The visiting rabbi insisted that Christianity is a religion of superstition, rather than reality, and offers its people the psychological satisfactions of mysticism. Psychological satisfaction? I doubt if any of the great mystics received any more psychological satisfaction than we would if we received a hundred volts of electricity. A mystical experience is not a satisfying one. It is burning. It is a ride on the tail of a comet, freezing, searing—for cold can burn even more than fire. It is not psychologically satisfying to have nightside and sunside meet in a blaze of ice and fire, to understand God as utterly distant and unknowable and yet so close that the comfort of the shadow of his wings can be intimately felt. In this rare, almost unbreathable atmosphere, sunside and nightside are resolved in paradox, and the incomprehensible is yet in some measure comprehended in contradiction.

  But the visiting rabbi insisted that Christianity is hung up on such psychological highs, while Judaism accepts this world, enjoying the creation of God, meals together, friendship, the beauties of nature. Jews accept the word; Christianity rejects it. Ouch, again.

  This visiting rabbi, whose name I have happily forgotten, did not have a stupid or diabolic version of Christianity. It was prepared for him by the Christians he has encountered. But to deny the world, as he suggests Christians do, is to deny the Incarnation. It is quite possible to have an incarnational view of the universe and not be a Christian; all artists are incarnational and not all artists are Christians, for instance. But it is not possible to be a Christian and not have an incarnational view of the universe. Christianity without incarnation is not Christianity.

  The rabbi, given his clue by Christians, told us that Christianity is a pleasant religion. It promises the faithful the joys of heaven to make up for the difficulties of life. And he referred to the Eucharist as ‘a magical act,’ and said that the Jews, instead of turning to magic, face reality.

  Magic? Reality? Who can blame the rabbi? I know that I, too, have misconceptions of Christianity. Sharing my thoughts with the members of the panel and, afterwards, with the congregation, helped me to clarify my own thinking, and by the end of the panel the crackling antagonism was gone and we were moving a good deal closer to understanding and acceptance than we would have thought possible the first night. And the women of the Hadassah asked me to come and share thoughts about being a woman.

  During the summer, when we are in the country and there is no Episcopal church nearby, I very much miss what the rabbi considered a magical act. I struggled to work out the difference between miracle and magic in The Other Side of the Sun.

  “Honoria,” Aunt Olivia asked, “what is a miracle?”

  Aunt Irene said, “Honoria, I’d like some more soldier beans, please.”

  Aunt Olivia held up her hand. “Wait. Honoria, what’s the difference between magic and a miracle? That ought to interest you, Irene.”

  Honoria stood, holding the silver dish in a linen napkin. “A human being can do magic. God do the miracle. Magic make the person think the power be in hisself. A miracle make him know the power belong to God.” She went out to the kitchen.

  But there are many people besides Aunt Irene and the rabbi who would like to toss off the Holy Mysteries as magic, and ineffectual magic at that, and it is Christians who have been responsible for this. The teachers from whom I have learned the most have never tried to make God comprehensible to me by intellect alone. The mind must be flexible enough to bend down to the heart; the mediating band must join nightside and sunside. To receive the bread and wine as the real body and blood of the Lord has indeed in some times and some places degenerated to superstitious magic; this can happen to all ritual, particularly at times when man’s power seems so sufficient that God’s is not needed.

  But all power is God’s, and God’s power is an expression of his joy, and all earthly ritual is afire with the powerful joy of the Resurrection. I do not fully understand the mystery of the Eucharist, but my lack of human understanding makes no difference; I am nourished and strengthened; this is what I know.

  Rejoice!

  You have just given me the universe,

  put it in my hands, held it to my lips,

  oh, here on my knees have I been fed

  the entire sum of all created matter,

  the everything

  that came from nothing.

  Rejoice!

  Who can doubt its power?

  Did not this crumb of bread

  this sip of wine

  burst into life

  that thundered across nothing

  and became the cause of all our

  celebrations?

  Oh, the explosion of nothing into something,

  into flaming, raging suns and shouting comets

  and drops of dew and spiders’ webs

  into mountains bursting forth with brilliant volcanoes

  valleys falling and rising

  laughing with joy

  earth’s cracking, primordial rains flooding

  a snowdrop’s star, a baby’s cry

  oh, rejoice!

  rejoice and celebrate

  eyes to see and ears to hear

  fingers to touch

  to touch

  the body’s living warmth

  hand stretched to hand

  across nothing

  making something

  celebrate

  lips to smile

  to kiss

  to take the bread and wine

  rejoice

  flowers grass pavements

  gutters garbage cans

  old people remembering

  babies laughing

  mothers singing

  fathers celebrating

  rejoice

  around the table

  hold hands

  all round

  like a ring circling a finger

  placed there as a promise

  holding the universe together

  nothing into something

  into joy and love

  rejoice

  and celebrate!

  So I struggle with my theology of failure and the Noes of God. I cannot totally withdraw from the Establishment again, no matter how sad and angry the Establishment may make me. Of course I find it easier to feel God w
hen I go alone at night to walk Timothy on the upper level of Riverside Park and move quietly through the fog or the falling snow; or in summer when I go out with him at night and walk under the glory of the stars. It is easier to feel and see and touch God thus than it is in church, but this private religion is not enough, is destructive when it is all there is; to find God only in a private mysticism is to break off from the Body, to leave the mainland, and ultimately to worship myself more than my Creator.

  On the first Pentecost the Holy Spirit came to the Body gathered together, not to separate individuals. But each one of those individuals was essential to the Body, because the Spirit teaches us that our understanding comes through particulars, never through generalities. Here my long years of writing again inform my groping theology. A story must be about particular people; the protagonist must be someone we recognize, and with whom we can identify.

  So should it be strange that this is how it has to be with the Incarnation, too? God shows us his nature through what has been called ‘the scandal of particularity.’ It is a scandal to think of God being fully God in Jesus of Nazareth, but there’s no other possible way for us to glimpse his love. Generalities get no further in religion than in fiction.

  I am helped to understand the Incarnation because Jesus Christ is the protagonist of Creation. This is the shocking aspect of particularity, that he is the hero, and although all of us want to play leads, we are, in fact, only supporting actors. But, as Stanislavsky, the director of the Moscow Art Theatre, said, “There are no small parts. There are only small actors.”

  I learn my part only as I am guided by the Spirit. And often I understand this guidance through hindsight, anamnesis, understanding something only after it has happened, as the Disciples could look back and understand Good Friday only after the glory of Easter and the joy of Pentecost.

  I know the gifts of the Spirit not only when I hear the rippling of tongues but also in the gift of silence, when understanding and joy come without words, in that mediating circle which is beyond and through the limitations of language, any kind of language at all.

  I stood with my friend Gillian at the bedside of a woman who was dying, badly, of a brain tumor, and she asked, “Will I ever again be whole?” And Gillian responded, “More whole than you have ever been before.” And we held hands and prayed together and there in the midst of human illness and the shadow of death we were touched with tongues of fire. The Spirit does not only come to us when we rejoice; the Spirit comes when we are most beaten, most in need.