The Irrational Season

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  Had my teacher not ridiculed my homework I might have done my lessons instead of painting pictures, playing the piano, writing stories, and working out my real self, not in the outward self which was rejected by teacher and classmates, but in the interior self. Undoubtedly I neglected sunside for nightside, but that was taken care of when I was wrested out of the world of imagination and plunged into boarding school where I had to learn about the outer world in order to survive.

  It was in boarding school that I learned to make my own solitude in the midst of the mob, to surround myself with a force field of concentration, in which I could dream and write stories and poems. The misery of a total lack of privacy during those years has been more than compensated for by the discipline of concentration I was forced to acquire. I wrote my first novel while I was on tour with a play, wrote in railway stations, in trains, in theatre dressing rooms which I shared, in hotel bedrooms which also I shared. I can write in any amount of sound and fury as long as I am not responsible for that sound and fury—as I discovered when I had children, and learned that I was not free to move into this kind of deep concentration until they were safely asleep in bed.

  The difficulties of those early days have proven to be advantages which have helped me to be more integrated than I might have been otherwise.

  And so, of course, does my profession, and my husband’s. In acting and in writing, the artist has to struggle for wholeness, just as in painting, or making music, or sculpting, or making pottery, or weaving. Sunside and nightside, maleness and femaleness, must collaborate. A priest, too, had better be aware of both the masculine and the feminine qualities of the priesthood, the two working together, participating in one person to make the image of God.

  The Reverend Alan W. Jones, in an article in The Anglican Theological Review (yes, it’s the same Alan I’ve been talking about in these pages, but now I am quoting him and it is appropriate to be more formal), writes, “One of the ways I understand my priesthood is as a midwife—bringing Christ to birth in others. This is no way determines my specific sexual identity. It does, thank God, creatively affirm the feminine within me.”

  The image of God, feminine and masculine, is, as image, physical. Sarxy: of the flesh. And the sheer physicalness of the image has not been easy for me. I used to find it difficult to talk about the resurrection of the body because it was lots easier for me to think of the soul as being separate from the body, imprisoned by it, and released from it at death like a bright bird suddenly freed and flying from the bars of the cage.

  But although Jesus was never recognized on sight after the Resurrection, he went to great pains to prove to his friends that he was indeed body. He ate fish—something not really possible for a disembodied spirit. He showed Thomas the marks of the nails in his hands, and of the spear in his side.

  Perhaps he wasn’t recognized on sight because we aren’t used to seeing bodies as they ought to be, whole, undistorted, complete.

  Complete does not mean finished. I cannot understand theologians who assert that when God created the universe it was not only whole and complete, it was finished. He’d done it, and that’s that. No change allowed.

  When I looked at and ran my hands over my newborn babies I checked to see that they were whole, complete, all ten fingers and toes, everything all there. And they were, praise God, magnificently complete and beautiful creatures. But not finished! Anything but finished! So why should we attempt to limit God to a finished creation? That assumption implies that God is even more limited than his creatures, whereas the God I reach out to has no limitations, and knows no dichotomy between light and dark.

  As long as we are unwilling to admit great areas of ourselves into our lives, to conjoin sunside and nightside, it is difficult for us not to put our trust in that which will rust and decay, where thieves can break in and steal.

  Is there anything in this life on which we can really and truly count? Certainly not our possessions. Nothing that money can buy. Not even human love. Even the most dependable is flawed and fallible. Participation is very good with Hugh and me right now, but I can’t count on this continuing forever. Death, if nothing else, separates all lovers. It strikes a chill to my bones as I see marriages of thirty, thirty-five, even forty years, breaking up, long after the partners have survived the trauma of the fledgelings leaving the nest. We all betray each other. No human being is totally faithful. Of course God is, but I see God through his creatures. Perhaps I can sometimes see him more clearly on weekends when we come to Crosswicks and I go and sit on the big rock at the brook, because I can count on the rock being there; but even the rock could not keep the rifle from firing at the icon on the tree in front of it; even the rock could break apart if there was an earthquake.

  So what can I put my trust in that I can really know, here and now? I used to think that when all else failed I would have my memories. Saint Exupéry said that in our old age we will sit under the sheltering branches of the tree of our memories. But I saw Grandfather’s memory being taken away from him, and then Mother’s, and that was the worst of all.

  THE AIR BITES SHREWDLY

  There is almost nothing a child cannot bear

  As long as the image of its parent shines clear.

  Age is acceptable, normal wear and tear,

  But poison cannot fall into the ear.

  The image distorts; safety is gone; is where?

  Hamlet, after the death of his father,

  Found, also, changes in his mother,

  And it was this latter, rather,

  It would seem to me, than the other

  That caused the dark storm clouds to gather.

  The person changed is blackly unacceptable

  (Primeval fears of presence of a devil);

  Soma, not psyche, may be corruptible.

  How does the distorted one find grace in this black evil?

  Help my mother to bear. God, make her able.

  It was death, in the end, which enabled her.

  The only thing we can count on completely is death. A friend of mine, a fine writer, said, “I am terrified of annihilation.” A senior at Harvard wrote me, “What I am afraid of is not-being.” I do not believe people who say they are not afraid of death. I do not believe people who say that they do not mind the thought of annihilation, that eternal nothingness sounds pleasant.

  The Michaelmas daisies, the goldenrod, the turning leaves, tell me that this Christian year is drawing to a close, and the Christian is taught that death is not annihilation, that death leads us into fuller life, not non-being. But the promise remains too glorious, too infinite, for us finite, time-trapped creatures to comprehend.

  The more I am enabled to give myself away, the more complete I become. When I can let go that part of me which struggles vainly to believe, then with my whole self I rejoice in knowing. The more I am enabled to abandon myself, the more full of life I am. So: death ought to be the ultimate act of self-abandonment in order that we may become wholly alive. To count on death as the only thing a human being can count on, is an affirmation of life.

  I think I like this. But then I wonder: if death is the door to life, why not suicide? Is it that if we refuse what we are given in one life, we are not ready to accept another? The answer to ‘why not suicide?’ lies, it has to lie, in the Incarnation, the fully lived life of Jesus of Nazareth as the essential prelude to his death and resurrection. He enjoyed life. Friends, food, drink. He took time to Be: when he was drained from all the demands his friends and neighbors made on him, he simply took off, abandoned them for as long as he needed to be alone with the Father and to be refilled—and often they did not like it. He did ask, in agony, to be spared the cross. But he accepted the No.

  To abandon the right to put an end to our lives whenever and however we want to (pills and bullets are easier than cancer or the cross) is part of that self-abandonment which is necessary for full being.

  I want to enter consciously into my own death. But hospitals and the ‘adva
nces’ of medicine often deny this. Dearma and Grandfather in very different ways died in their sleep. Mother said that she would like to die as Grandfather did, just slip off quietly, unknowing, and in the end this prayer was granted her as she slipped out of life in Bion’s arms.

  I think that I would like to know.

  But there are not many quiet and conscious deaths nowadays. Dearma, Grandfather, Mother, all died at home, and that is as it should be. Next best, Grandma Josephine, in the hospital, was allowed to die in a way no longer permissible; she said that the needles with the intravenous feedings bothered her; she asked Hugh and his sister Genevieve to have them taken out; and this was permitted; and she died knowing that she was going to meet her Lord Jesus. My mother-in-law’s faith never faltered. She both believed and knew.

  Euthanasia, I am convinced, is wrong. It becomes far too easy to get rid of the old or the unwanted; the needle is more painless and less expensive and more final than the Old People’s Home. But what I call reverse euthanasia is equally wrong. Keeping a body alive which would under normal circumstances die is a kind of murder.

  I did make the difficult decision not to force-feed Mother during her last weeks. When a body is no longer able to eat or, even worse, to breathe without machines, unless there is real hope of real cure, of return to full life, then that body should be allowed to die. Keeping permanent vegetables plugged into machines is, as far as I am concerned, sin. And this struggle to keep a mere lump of flesh ‘alive’ is a result of technology turned into technocracy. I am all for technology; I see because of technology. But technocracy is a symptom of a world where only man is God and death is the victor. Even during my worst periods of atheism I can’t accept that.

  Atheism is, for me, a virulent virus, put into the world by the Evil One for our destruction, and I come down with it as on occasion I have come down with flu. When the Michaelmas daisies and the goldenrod were gone this autumn, and the leaves stripped from the trees, I had a horrible attack. It was brought on by a long series of events.

  Just before Thanksgiving and my birthday and the first Sunday of Advent, Mrs. O died. She had long been ready; we could only welcome her release into glory, and I am sure that there is more laughter in heaven now that she is there. But those of us who love her were very aware of how much we are going to miss her.

  When one of the Sisters had called to tell me that her mother had died, I had thought to myself that if they asked me if there was anything of their mother’s I would like to have as a keepsake, I would ask for her rosary; surely those glass beads, so prayed on with her fingers and heart, would contain something of her grace. But they were twined about the dead fingers in the coffin, so I said nothing.

  At the last moment, just before the lid was shut down, Sister Anastasia went back to kneel before her mothers’s body. When she came back she held out her hand, in which something was clasped. “Madeleine, would you like Mother’s rosary?” And she dropped it into my palm. For this intuitive understanding, I will always be grateful.

  We left the funeral parlor and went to the church. At first we did not realize why it was we could not go into the nave. Then we saw that another funeral was going on inside. When the mourners had filed out, we went in. Nothing can take away completely the beauty and comfort of the Requiem Mass, but it was given life only by the congregation of people who had loved the ninety-five-year old woman; the priest said words which had been repeated so often that they had become empty.

  When I was a child I sometimes took a word or a phrase and said it over and over again until it had lost all meaning. The saying of the words of the Mass reminded me of this childish game. But that was my fault as much as the priest’s, or even more. It wouldn’t have bothered Mrs. O, because nothing could dim for her the reality of the glory.

  When we left the church another hearse was rounding the corner for yet another funeral.

  I went back to the Cathedral library and finished the work day, and then walked home with Timothy. There was quite a lot of mail and I sat down on the foot of the bed to read it. An extraordinary and unexpected blessing has been birthday cards and even presents from people who have read my books and become my friends, and I opened several of these, my heart melting within me with love and gratitude.

  One card seemed to be full of what I took to be potpourri, a thoughtful gift. But then I noticed that it was a get-well card and not a birthday card, which struck me as strange since, thank God, I had not been ill. Then I sniffed the dried flowers and they had no scent. Then I looked closer.

  I called Hugh, “Please come here.” He got up from his chair and came at the tight urgency in my voice. “Are these cockroaches?”

  They were. Someone had taken the trouble to collect about a cupful of cockroaches and put them in a get-well card, and send them to me. The timing couldn’t have been more accurate, although I doubt if whoever it was knew that it was near my birthday, or the day of the funeral of the woman who had been a second mother to me.

  For a moment I thought I was going to vomit, so physical was my reaction. Then I got the vacuum cleaner and vacuumed the bedspread, the rug, clean of all trace of the shiny brown deadness of the roaches. I said quite calmly to Hugh, “If life in an old building in New York were not a constant battle against cockroaches, this would be even more horrible.”

  It was horrible enough. It was a manifestation of a hate even more sick than the hate which had taken a rifle and shot through the icon at the brook. I do not know who it was, and I will probably never know, and this is just as well.

  That night we had seats at the ballet, seats ordered months before. I took Mrs. O’s rosary with me and held it in my hand all evening, tangibly holding off the powers of darkness. Because those small beads were icons of love, hate could not surround me entirely; the Circle of love was stronger than the strangling bonds of hate.

  But that day did nothing to help my attack of atheism.

  Tallis was off to Australia to preach at the consecration of a mutual friend, otherwise I would have gone running to him. I did find myself telling a young friend, a religious staying briefly in New York en route to join her community, the Little Sisters of Jesus. She thought briefly, then said, “You are very much loved, and where there is great love there is also great hate,” and her affirmation of the love made the hate less terrible.

  And even in my atheism I could pray for this hate, this horrible sickness, could pray for its healing.

  Another help came in a letter from France, from a friend who has often been in positions of authority and power, and who has received several anonymous poison-pen letters. “I was upset and hurt and shocked and angered by them, and I remember praying for the person who sent the ugly picture, for the men who drew it, printed it, and sold it. It doesn’t worry me now, because it’s all part of the dust anyone kicks up who sticks out his/her neck, takes a stand on anything significant, has any impact. If we had more impact, we’d probably be shot, like King and the Kennedys.”

  That lightened my perspective.

  A few days later the phone on my desk in the Cathedral Library rang. Long Distance. The eighteen-year-old daughter of a friend of mine, in a small town in the Midwest, had been kidnapped as she went to her car with a bag of groceries, driven out of town, raped, and murdered. Not in New York. In a small town where everybody was known by name. A lovely child had her life taken away from her, brutally and slowly. And there was nothing I, at this distance, or indeed any of the friends at home, could do to help.

  That afternoon a college-age friend of mine dropped in to see me as she usually does whenever she’s in town. I was appalled at her appearance. Her skin was tinged with grey; there were deep circles under her eyes. She came to kiss me and she was trembling all over. I plugged the pot in for tea, and she told me that she had left the hospital the day before, after an abortion. There was no question of marriage; she had thought the boy loved her, but he didn’t, and she did not want marriage under those conditions. But she did want t
he baby. Her parents, respectable, affluent, arranged the abortion, took her to the hospital with cold efficiency, and left her there for forty-eight hours. “And I knew, when I woke from the anaesthesia, that I had committed murder. I let them force me into it. I could have stopped them if I’d wanted to badly enough.” Tears overflowed.

  This was no time for reason. She flung herself into my arms like a small child and wept.

  A few nights later the attack of atheism took hold. I could no longer fend it off.

  I woke up in the night as I usually do with the words of the Jesus Prayer plashing up into my conscious mind like a little fountain, as they have been doing for years. And I thought bitterly, why on earth am I saying these meaningless and empty words? They mean nothing. Lord Jesus Christ is only an illusion. There is nothing. Nada. Nada. Nada.

  I lay in cold isolation on my side of the bed, not even reaching out with hand or foot to touch the warm and sleeping flesh of my husband in my usual instinctive affirmation of incarnation.

  Nothing. Nothing.

  And then I flung myself onto the words of the prayer like a drowning person clutching at a rope thrown into the dark sea. I held onto it with all my strength and I was slowly pulled from the waters which had been sucking me under, pulled out of the dark and into the light and Lord Jesus Christ did indeed have mercy on me.

  For a long time I was convalescent, recuperating slowly from the virulent attack, a little less feverish (as it were) each day. I was called to conduct a retreat and this was the best medicine I could have been given.

  I know that I am not immune from further attacks. But I also know that the darkness cannot put out the light.

  For an English friend I wrote, one winter when he was in New York and staying at the General Seminary:

  Come, let us gather round the table.

  Light the candles. Steward, pour the wine.

  It’s dark outside. The streets are noisy