A Stone for a Pillow

by Madeleine L'engle

  For Jacob the house of God was not a building, not an enclosure, but an open place with earth for the floor, heaven for the roof. It would be several generations before the ark of God was built. For the early people of El Shaddai, the All Mighty One, any place where God spoke to them became the house of God.

  So Jacob took the desert stone he had used for a pillow, and upon which he had dreamed the angelic dream, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. Oil—precious, sacramental. Today we can buy oils of all kinds, bath oil, olive oil, virgin oil, saturated and unsaturated oil. But to Jacob and his tribe, any oil was precious enough to make a significant sacrifice to El Shaddai and that sense of oil as sacramental and significant is retained today in my church as the healing oils are blessed each year.

  Jacob called the place where he had set up the pillow-altar Beth-el—the house of God. Seekers and followers have sensed the Presence ever since, in circumstances that were often far from comfortable, as Luci Shaw suggests in her poem “Disciple” based on Luke 9:57–58:

  Foxes lope home at dusk, each

  to his sure burrow. Every bird

  flies the twilight

  to her down-lined nest.

  Yet come with me to learn

  a stern new comfort: the earth’s

  bed, me on guard at your side,

  and, like pilgrim Jacob,

  a stone for a pillow.

  A stone for a pillow. It sounds odd to us, until we remember that very few people on this planet go to bed at night on soft pillows. In Japan the headrest is often made of wood. In some countries it is simply the ground. I’ve tried a stone, not in bed, but late on a hot afternoon, when I call the dogs, and walk across the fields to the woods. Placed under the neck in just the right way, a stone can help me relax after a morning of typing—though I wouldn’t want it for a whole night. But for a time to rest, to think, to let go and be, a warm, rounded stone can be a good pillow, reminding me that I am indeed in the house of God, that wherever I call upon my maker is always God’s house.

  When I was writing And It Was Good, reflections on the first chapters of Genesis, I found it helpful, when talking about the Creator, to use el (the first name by which the ancient Hebrew called God), rather than the personal pronoun, she/he, him/her. I still find it helpful when thinking about the Maker of All Things. The personal pronoun was not a problem when it referred to the entirety of the human being, but we are presently living in a genitally-oriented culture, and I do not find it comfortable to limit God to the current sexual connotations and restrictions of the personal pronoun. Calling God She is just as sexist and limiting as calling God He.

  It is fascinating that the conflict over God’s sexuality comes at a time when pornography and sexual license are rampant. Even small cities have their massage parlors and “adult” bookstores. This emphasis on the male and female genitals seems to be everywhere, even in our vision of the Creator.

  Of course God is mother, nurturer, generator, as well as father, ruler, lawmaker. But when we pound away with a sledgehammer at God’s sexuality (Ouch! but that is the image that comes to mind) we are seeing a God even more anthropomorphic than the God of the patriarchs.

  In a universe which is becoming more and more varied as we discover more of the glories of the macrocosm and the infinite variety of the microcosm (are stars confined by gender? or quarks?), this preoccupation with God’s sex seems amazingly primitive. But then, I suspect that we are still a pretty primitive people.

  For all our mechanical and electronic sophistication, our thinking about ourselves and our maker is often unimaginative, egocentric, and childish. We need to do a great deal of growing up in order to reach out and adore a God who loves all of us with unqualified love.

  But all those thousands of years ago when our forbears lived in the desert of an underpopulated and largely unexplored planet, the God of Jacob was definitely a masculine God, the Father God of the Patriarchs. So, when I am within Jacob’s frame of reference, I’ll return, for his story, to the masculine pronoun. But when I am lying on the rock in the late afternoon I am not in Jacob’s time, or indeed not in any chronologic time at all, but in kairos, God’s time, which touches on eternity.

  I lie there quietly, lapped in peace, the blue of sky the ceiling, the stone under me the foundation, the trees forming arches rather than walls. The breeze is gentle, the sun not too hot; the stone is sun-warm and firm beneath me. Sometimes after dinner I go out to the rock known as the star-watching rock and wait for the stars to come out. There I can see all of Creation as the house of God, with the glory of the stars reminding me of the Creator’s immensity, diversity, magnificence.

  The stars are often referred to in Genesis. El Shaddai took Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, out into the desert night to show him the stars and to make incredible promises. How glorious those stars must have been all those centuries ago when the planet was not circled by a corona of light from all our cities, by smog from our internal combustion engines. Jacob, lying on the ground, the stone under his head, would have seen the stars as we cannot see them today. Perhaps we have thrown up a smoke screen between ourselves and the angels.

  But Jacob would not have been blinded to the glory of the stars as part of the interdependence of the desert, the human being, the smallest insects, all part of Creation.

  If we look at the makeup of the word disaster, dis-aster, we see dis, which means separation, and aster, which means star. So dis-aster is separation from the stars. Such separation is disaster indeed. When we are separated from the stars, the sea, each other, we are in danger of being separated from God.

  Sometimes the very walls of our churches separate us from God and each other. In our various naves and sanctuaries we are safely separated from those outside, from other denominations, other religions, separated from the poor, the ugly, the dying. I’m not advocating pulling down the walls of our churches, though during the activist sixties I used to think it might be a good idea if we got rid of all churches which seat more than two hundred. But then I think of the huge cathedral which is my second home in New York, and how its great stone arms welcome a multitude of different people, from the important and affluent to waifs and strays and the little lost ones of a great, overcrowded city. We need to remember that the house of God is not limited to a building that we usually visit for only a few hours on Sunday. The house of God is not a safe place. It is a cross where time and eternity meet, and where we are—or should be—challenged to live more vulnerably, more interdependently. Where, even with the light streaming in rainbow colours through the windows, we can listen to the stars.

  Stars have always been an icon of creation for me. During my high school years, when I was at my grandmother’s beach cottage for vacations, I loved to lie on a sand dune and watch the stars come out over the ocean, often focussing on the brilliant grace of one particular star. Back in school, I wrote these lines:

  I gaze upon the steady star

  That comes from where I cannot see,

  And something from that distant far

  Pierces the waiting core of me

  And fills me with an aweful pain

  That I must count not loss but gain.

  If something from infinity

  Can touch and strike my very soul,

  Does that which comes from out of me

  Reach and pierce its far off goal?

  Very young verses, but they contain the germ of an understanding of the interdependence of all Creation.

  After I was out of college, living in New York and working on my first novel, I was so hungry for stars that I would take the subway up to the Planetarium and connect myself to the stars that way. My distress at being separated from the stars is not something esoteric or occult; it is a symptom of separation from Creation and so, ultimately, from community, family, each other, Creator.

  —

  That January evening after the first tiring day as a juror, after I had read the story of Jacob and the ang
els, I turned to the New Testament, to read from the ninth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus had called Matthew from collecting taxes. In Israel in those days, a tax collector worked for the hated Romans, rather than for an equivalent of the IRS. We don’t have any analogy for the kind of tax collector Matthew was. But because they were employed by the enemy, all tax collectors were scum.

  Nevertheless, incredibly, Jesus called Matthew to be one of his disciples, and that night he went for dinner to his house, where there were more tax collectors, and various other kinds of social outcasts, and the censorious Pharisees asked the disciples, “Why does your master eat with tax collectors?”

  Jesus heard the question and said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. Go and learn the meaning of the words, What I want is mercy, not sacrifice.” He was quoting from the prophet, Hosea. And he went on, “And indeed I have not come to call the virtuous, but sinners.”

  I’m uneasy about self-conscious virtue. It implies that the virtuous person is in control, keeps all the laws, has all the answers, always knows what is right and what is wrong. It implies a conviction which enables the virtuous person to feel saved, while the rest of the world is convicted.

  Probably it was because I was on jury duty that I noticed the paradoxical connections between the words conviction, convince, convicted, convict (noun), and convict (verb). If we assume that we are virtuous, particularly when we set our virtue against someone else’s sin, we are proclaiming a forensic, crime-and-punishment theology, not a theology of love. The Pharisees who did not like to see Jesus eating with sinners wanted virtue—virtue which consisted in absolute obedience to the law.

  The Pharisees were not bad people, remember. They were good. They were virtuous. They did everything the Moral Majority considers moral. They knew right from wrong, and they did what was right. They went regularly to the services in the temple. They tithed, and they didn’t take some off the top for income tax or community services or increased cost-of-living expenses. They were, in fact, what many Christians are calling the rest of us to be: good, moral, virtuous, and sure of being saved.

  So what was wrong? Dis-aster. Separation from the stars, from the tax collectors, the Samaritans, from the publican who beat his breast and knew himself to be a sinner. The Pharisees, not all of them, but some of them, looked down on anybody who was less moral, less virtuous than they were. They assumed that their virtue ought to be rewarded and the sin of others punished.

  If we twelve jurors found those two men guilty as charged, they would be punished by the state. They would likely be put in prison: forensic punishment. Necessary in our judicial system, perhaps, but Berdyaev warned that we should not think of God’s ways as being judicial. God is a God of love.

  When I looked at those two cruel-faced men I had to remind myself that they were God’s children, and that they were loved. If they had committed the crime of which they were accused, it would cause God grief, not anger.

  The three patriarchs must have caused El Shaddai considerable grief. If Jacob was a cheat, it ran in the family. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had much in common—long lives, many wives, children born late to the barren but beloved wife, and a shrewdness which did not shrink from cheating.

  Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, who had been called by God from the comforts of home into the dangers of a strange land, pretended to King Abimelech of Gerar that his wife, Sarah, was his sister. According to the custom of that place and time, Abimelech or one of his men could “know” the stranger’s sister. But if they wanted his wife, then, according to custom, they would have to kill the husband.

  Abimelech uncovered Abraham’s deception, and then, a generation later, we have almost the same story with Isaac, Abraham’s son, pretending that Rebekah is his sister, not his wife, in order to protect his own skin. And again Abimelech discovers the deception.

  “Why did you do this to me?” he demands.

  “So you wouldn’t kill me,” Isaac answers. Isaac, like Abraham, his father, was willing to sacrifice his beautiful wife’s honour to these powerful men in order to save his own life. Evidently both Sarah and Rebekah went along with the deception, but whether willingly or unwillingly we are not told. Many things were different in those days, particularly the position of women.

  —

  In order for us to know Jacob and to think about his story, it is helpful to remember his family tree. Jacob was the third of the three patriarchs. The first was Abraham.

  Abraham and his wife, Sarah, had a son, Isaac.

  Isaac and his wife, Rebekah, had twin sons, Esau and Jacob.

  Isaac never seemed to question the fact that his father Abraham’s God was also his God. But Jacob was a more complicated character than his father. It took him considerable time and several incredible encounters with the divine Presence before he decided to accept as his own God the God of his father, Isaac, and his grandfather, Abraham. He tried to bargain with God, but he found that his bargaining did not work. Ultimately he dropped all his deviousness and cheating and, naked before God, accepted El Shaddai.

  Isaac, a far more direct person than his son, was acted on more often than he was allowed to act. Abraham actually raised the knife to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. He also chose Isaac’s wife for him, and although Isaac came to love Rebekah, he had no say in the choosing of her. And yet Isaac knew himself to be singled out by God, and he remained faithful to this God who made promises as splendid as the star-filled sky.

  The God of the Patriarchs belonged to a people, rather than to a place. El Shaddai, their God, was one god among many gods, the varied and various deities of the surrounding tribes. Throughout the Old Testament, there are numerous references to other gods, and to “our” God as the greatest of these. Whose God is like our God? There is no other God like our God. “Who is he among the gods, that shall be like unto the Lord?” asks the psalmist.

  The chief difference between the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the gods of the other tribes, was that El Shaddai cared for, loved his people, and did not stand apart from them and demand constant blood sacrifices. It was the other gods who were forensic. Jacob’s God was the God who was in the story. It is only slowly, as we move through Scripture, that this God among many gods becomes the God who is One, the God who is All. The human being’s attempt to understand the Creator is never static; it is constantly in motion. If we let our concept of God become static, and we have done so over and over again throughout history, we inevitably blunder into a forensic interpretation, and that does not work.

  In a vain attempt to make people see God as an avenging judge, theologians have even altered the meaning of words. Atonement, for instance. A bad word, if taken forensically.

  A young friend said to me during Holy Week, “I cannot cope with the atonement.”

  Neither can I, if the atonement is thought of forensically. In forensic terms, the atonement means that Jesus had to die for us in order to atone for all our awful sins, so that God could forgive us. In forensic terms, it means that God cannot forgive us unless Jesus is crucified and by this sacrifice atones for all our wrongdoing.

  But that is not what the word means! I went to an etymological dictionary and looked it up. It means exactly what it says, at-one-ment. I double-checked it in a second dictionary. There is nothing about crime and punishment in the makeup of that word. It simply means to be at one with God. Jesus on the cross was so at-one with God that death died there on Golgotha, and was followed by the glorious celebration of the Resurrection.

  Our legal system has to be forensic. We have laws, Paul points out, because we have sin. And what is sin? It is not frivolous to say that sin is discourtesy.

  —

  Discourtesy. I sat in the jury room with the radiators hissing and the January cold pressing against the windows, hearing the constant sound of taxis and buses and cars honking on the streets below, and thought of Crosswicks, our house outside a village so small that it doesn’t have traffic lights. In N
ew York, without lights, our traffic would be in an even worse mess than it is. I was amazed when I was at Saint Scholastica College in Duluth, Minnesota, to find a city so small that there were few traffic lights, and at the intersections cars courteously took turns. By and large, drivers across the United States are not that courteous. So we need traffic lights.

  Sin, then, is discourtesy pushed to an extreme, and discourtesy is lack of at-one-ment. If you drive your car without any thought for the other drivers on the road, you are separating yourself. To be discourteous is to think only of yourself, and not of anybody else. The result of this “me, myself, and I”-ism leads to the horror of drivers who will hit animals—or human beings—and callously drive on. Dis-aster. Separation. Atonement reversed and shattered. And so crime increases in the anonymity of our cities, as does drunkenness and drug-taking and stealing and raping and killing, and as a result we have our judicial system, and the criminal courts. In that dusty little jury room I understood Paul’s comment that we have laws because we have sin. Dis-aster. But the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob precede the coming of the Law, and there was for the patriarchs, despite their cheating and lying, an innocence in their encounters with God that got lost with laws, with crime and punishment.

  If we on the panel found those two men guilty, the state would punish them, but I’m not at all sure that this forensic type of punishment is punishment at all. It may be deterrence, or an attempt to protect the innocent. I have no desire to go all wishy-washy and bleeding-heart about the rapist who is let off with an easy sentence so that he can then go out and rape and kill again, as statistics prove is almost inevitable. Our jails may be deplorable, our courts overcrowded and years behind schedule; our lawyers are not knights in shining armour; but we do what we can, in our blundering way, to curb crime and violence, and our top-heavy system remains one of the best on the planet.