A Stone for a Pillow

by Madeleine L'engle

  And his mother said, “Upon me be the curse, my son. Just obey me and go fetch the kids.”

  So Jacob obeyed his mother, and she made savoury meat, such as Isaac loved. And she took Esau’s best clothes, and put them on Jacob. And she put the skins of the kids and goats upon his hands, and upon the smooth of his neck. And she gave the savoury meat and the bread, which she had prepared, to Jacob.

  And Jacob went to his father, and said, “My father,” and Isaac said, “Here I am. Who are you?”

  And Jacob said to his father, “I am Esau, your firstborn. I have done what you have asked of me. So sit and eat my venison, that your soul may bless me.”

  Was old Isaac a little suspicious? He asked a penetrating question—how had his son found the venison so quickly?

  And Jacob answered, “Because the Lord, your God, brought it to me.”

  The Lord, your God? Was God not yet Jacob’s God? Did he have to wait for the night of wrestling with the angel to know God? Isaac, still seeming suspicious, told his son to come closer to him, to be felt.

  And Jacob went near his father, and Isaac felt him, and said, “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.”

  And Isaac did not recognize Jacob because his hands were hairy, so he blessed him, and he asked, “Are you truly my son Esau?”

  And Jacob said, “I am.”

  And Isaac ate of the savoury venison, and drank some wine, and then he said, “Come near me, and kiss me, my son.”

  And Jacob came near and kissed him, and Isaac smelled the smell of his clothes, and blessed him, and said, “See, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field which the Lord has blessed. May God give you dew from heaven and the richness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine. Let people serve you, and nations bow down to you. Be lord over your brother. Let the sons of your mother bow down to you. Cursed be everyone who curses you, and blessed be everyone who blesses you.”

  And so Isaac gave to Jacob the blessing which should have gone to Esau.

  And it came to pass as soon as Isaac had finished blessing Jacob, and Jacob had scarcely left the presence of Isaac, that Esau came in from hunting. And he also had made savoury meat and brought it to his father, saying, “Let my father arise and eat of his son’s venison, that your soul may bless me.”

  And Isaac his father said to him, “Who are you?”

  And he said, “I am your son, your firstborn, Esau.”

  And Isaac trembled greatly and said, “Who? Where is he who took venison and brought it to me? I ate all of it before you came, and I blessed him. Yes, and he shall be blessed.”

  For a blessing, once given, cannot be retracted.

  And when Esau heard the words of his father, he gave a great and bitter cry, and said to his father, “Bless me, even me also, O my father.” And he wept.

  But Isaac had given the blessing reserved for the first son. It had been given, and he could not take it back. He said,

  “Far from the richness of the earth shall be your dwelling place, far from the dew that falls from heaven. You shall live by your sword, and you shall serve your brother. But when you win your freedom, you shall shake his yoke from your neck.”

  Esau’s story is a tragic one, and all the more so because of his unloveliness, covered with red hair, smelling of the blood of the animals he had killed, over-easily duped by his brother. (And by his mother, though he may not have known that.) One can hardly blame him for deciding that after Isaac had died, and the mourning period was over, he would kill his brother.

  He may have shouted this aloud in his outrage, for someone told Rebekah, and she called Jacob and urged him to leave quickly and go to her brother, Laban, in Haran, and stay there until Esau’s anger had cooled.

  So Jacob left, taking with him Isaac’s blessing.

  —

  We take both blessing and cursing much too casually nowadays. When someone sneezes we say, “Bless you,” hardly thinking. It used to be believed that when one sneezes one is very close to death, and therefore to say, “Bless you,” truly meant something important. It does. We need to reawaken our sense of blessing.

  Often I hear a casual “dammit,” meaning nothing but momentary annoyance, but to damn someone is serious indeed, because even our casual irritations leave their imprint and cannot be erased.

  How do we learn to bless, rather than damn, those with whom we disagree, those whom we fear, those who are different?

  Cursing is more a matter of intent than of language. Listen to a group of construction workers, or stagehands, and you will hear the four-letter words fly, but more likely they are used with affection, rather than malice. The liberal use of such words is often no more than regional or vocational vocabulary.

  Whereas someone can say, calmly, “I do want you to know that I understand why you did this, and that I forgive you,” and more venom can drip from those words than from any amount of casual profanity. Most Christians object to swearing because it is specifically forbidden by Christ in the fifth chapter of Matthew’s gospel. There is, of course, a difference between using God’s name “in vain” and merely vulgar, gutter words. But what offended Jesus was hardness of heart, not laxness of language, which often stems from paucity of vocabulary. I suspect that if we could have heard the speech of some of Jesus’ followers we might be disturbed. It was those whose lives were whitewashed on the outside, but full of dead bones inside, who made Jesus angry.

  Certainly I am not advocating coarse or careless language. Far from it. But I am concerned about the intent behind the words which may be more significant than the words themselves. When I read a novel I am concentrating on the characters’ hearts, and if the heart is warm, and open to growth in love, I probably won’t even notice a few racy words. After all, I’ve worked in the theater and heard the stagehands. I spend much of the year living on Manhattan’s upper west side. I’ve learned that it is what’s behind the words that truly counts.

  Not long ago in Toronto, I was on a radio program with two Canadian writers. I was given some of their books to read, and was told that the author of one of them, Kevin Major, “uses questionable language.” That night I read his Hold Fast, a novel set in Newfoundland. I thought that it was a fine book, and that the language, according to the situation and place, was not at all inappropriate. And on page seven, Major himself expressed exactly what I feel. His protagonist says of his uncle, “The swear words, when he spitted them out of him, was almost enough to curl up my guts. Not the words, that was nothing. I was use to that. But the way he said them. People swear in different ways. Dad used to swear and he hardly had a clue he was swearing it. But the way the same words came out of Uncle Ted, it was like a set of teeth, tearing into her.”

  Those of us blessed with a good education have the responsibility to use vocabulary judiciously, not carelessly. And to bless, not curse. To affirm, not damn.

  In this muddled world it is not always easy to bless, but that is our calling. To curse is not only to wound another, it is to put ourselves in bondage. To bless is to be made free to bear God’s love.

  —

  A writer I admire horrified me by saying that perhaps we will see Jesus coming again on a mushroom cloud, that the sign of the Second Coming will be the rolling cloud of an exploded nuclear bomb. No! Everything in me rejects the conjunction of an act of destructive hate with God’s act of Creative love. And yet I have come to realize with sadness mingled with horror that some Christians are beginning to equate the Second Coming with nuclear disaster.

  That cannot be. Of one thing only am I certain: The Second Coming is an action of Love. The judgment of God is the judgment of love, not of power plays or vindication or hate. The Second Coming is the redemption of the entire cosmos, not just one small planet.

  Saint Paul, writing to the people of Rome, reminds us that

  The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God….the creation itself will be set free from its bondage of decay and obtain
the glorious liberty of the children of God.

  All of Creation groans in travail. All will be redeemed in God’s fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.

  To equate the Second Coming with nuclear holocaust is to expect God to curse Creation, not to bless; to look for hell, not heaven, which is a kind of blasphemy, for we are called to live in hope. A Second Coming on a sulphurous, radioactive death-dealing cloud would be a victory for Satan, not Christ.

  It would seem that the majority of those who see nuclear warfare and the Second Coming together are those who see Christ’s coming in glory as exclusively for them and their fellow brand of believers. They, and they only, will be raptured up to heaven, and everybody else will burn in hell. Heaven is somewhat like a restricted country club for a favoured few, and the Lord of Love is quite willing to curse everybody else.

  The Lord of Love?

  There’s a story of a good man who dies and goes to heaven, and who is welcomed at the pearly gates, which are thrown open for him to enter. He goes through them in a daze of bliss, because it is everything he has been taught, golden streets, milk and alabaster and honey and golden harps. He wanders the streets lost in happiness, until after a while he realizes that he is all alone; he hasn’t seen anybody at all. He walks and walks, and he sees nobody.

  So he goes back to the gates, and asks, “Peter?”

  “Yes, my son?”

  “This really is heaven?”

  “Oh, yes, my son. Don’t you like it?”

  “Oh, it’s just wonderful! But where is everybody? Where are the prophets? Where is the Holy Family? Where are the saints?”

  Peter looks at him kindly. “Oh, them? They’re all down in hell, ministering to the damned. If you’d like to join them, I’ll show you the way.”

  —

  Jesus said, “And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.”

  The prophets who are discovering and pointing out devil-worshippers, who sniff out pornography and dirty words, are also among those who equate the Second Coming with Judgment Day.

  Cold. It is coldness of heart that prophesies falsely.

  Jesus continues,

  “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, who shall show great signs and wonders, so that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. But of the day and hour no one knows, no, not the angels of heaven, but my father only.”

  Throughout the centuries there have been countless false prophets proclaiming the end of the world. As the first millennium approached, a great many Christians thought that with the year One Thousand would come Judgment Day. Since then there have been many other predictions of the world’s end, including a goodly number in our own century. Some of the prophets have backed their predictions with quotations from John’s Revelation, but that great visionary book is not to be taken literally. It is a sign of pride to think we can predict the end which Jesus said was hidden even from the angels. We do not know when it is coming. We must prepare, lest the bridegroom’s coming catch us unaware. But we do not know. Being prepared, and knowing when the bridegroom is coming are two very different things. Jesus was emphatic about that.

  How do we tell the false prophet from the true prophet? The true prophet seldom predicts the future. The true prophet warns us of our present hardness of heart, our prideful presuming to know God’s mind. And the final test of the true prophet is love. God came to us as Jesus because of love. All the ills of the Fall will be righted and redeemed in the Second Coming because of love.

  We must be careful in our right and proper protests against the folly of nuclear stockpiling that we are protesting truly, that we are not being false prophets fearing only for our own selves, our own families, our own country. Our concern must be for everybody, for the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, for our entire fragile planet, and everybody on it. And for all of God’s creation, because we cannot blow ourselves up in isolation. Indeed, we must protest with loving concern for the entire universe.

  The Old Testament prophets were often reluctant. The false prophets took pride in their prophesying and told the people what they wanted to hear, and so were popular. Whereas the true prophets, warning the people of the consequences of their evil actions, were anything but popular. They risked their lives. A mark of the true prophet in any age is humility, self-emptying so there is room for God’s Word. The true prophet receives the Word as Isaiah did: “Here I am, send me.” Or Mary: “Be it unto me according to your word.”

  Terrible disasters may await us. The planet is already sundered by war, starvation, drought, famine, earthquake, flood, tornado. But we should not read too much into these signs. Those who study weather patterns tell us that until a decade ago we had approximately fifty years of extremely unusual weather, fairly temperate and predictable. Now we are back to ordinary weather patterns, violent, and unpredictable. “Why do we bother to listen to the forecast?” we say. “It’s almost always wrong.” So let us not read an easy eschatology into a return to the kind of weather patterns which have been the norm for our planet during most of recorded history.

  Jesus said, remember, that even the angels in heaven do not know the time of his return. No one can prophesy that everything is going to be easy, that there won’t be more tornados or hurricanes or volcanic explosions. But nuclear warfare is an ultimate cursing. And we are told to bless.

  Zephaniah, after prophesying the terrible things which would result from hardness of heart, then proclaims,

  “Your God is mightily in your midst. He will exult with joy over you, he will renew you by his love; he will dance with shouts of joy for you as on a day of festival.”

  The love of God is a great mystery, so far does it transcend our own diminished capacity for love and blessing. The marvel is that God’s love can transform and augment ours. As we turn our hearts to blessing, we share in Heaven’s blessing.

  How do we bless those who would damn? Those who would consign most of the world to eternal hell? How do we bless assassins and terrorists, or even the lawyers in the criminal courts who try to get verdicts of not guilty for people they well know to be guilty?

  How do I bless the person who is no longer willing to be my friend because of a secret I never told? How do I bless the person who did pass on that secret?

  One thing I have learned is that I do not have to do it graciously. A blessing given is a blessing given. I sat in my quiet corner one night after jury duty, the Bible open on my lap, and I knew that I still had hurt in my heart, and that I was still angry at whoever was permitting a great load of blame and shame to be laid on me. And I heard myself saying—and meaning—“Oh, God, bless the bastard.”

  What did I mean by that? Just what I said. I was not demanding justification, or vindication, or a change of heart on the other person’s part. The blessing stood, just as it was.

  We must bless without wanting to manipulate. Without insisting that everything be straightened out right now. Without insisting that our truth be known. This means simply turning whoever it is we need to bless over to God, knowing that God’s powerful love will do what our own feeble love or lack of it won’t. I have suggested that it is a good practice to believe in six impossible things every morning before breakfast, like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass. It is also salutary to bless six people I don’t much like every morning before breakfast.

  If we all blessed Muammar Qaddafi, what do you suppose would happen?

  If a blessing is irrevocable, what about a cursing? We human beings can, and do, hurt each other through cursing. Most of us are aware of the power of black magic and its hexes and spells and killing sticks, and are rightly afraid of and shun it. But the most powerful evil magic is weak before Christ, and shrivels in the light of Christ’s love.

  The light shines
in the darkness, and the darkness cannot put it out.

  Then what about all that primitive cursing of our enemies in the Bible? Here again we are pushed to move on beyond the spiritual place where some of the biblical narrators and singers of the psalms stood. God uses raggle taggle material, and there is hope that we will learn from experience. We do not have to invent the lever, the needle, the wheel over and over again. We are not expected to sit still in our understanding, but to add wisdom to knowledge, and to move on.

  The vision of God in Genesis is varied, and contradictory. The God we read about in the stories seems often different from the God in the histories, or the laws. God was seen both as the Creator of the universe, and as the tribal God who helped his chosen people take over the neighbour’s land. God was the Maker of all the stars, and God was the masculine warrior God. This jealous God commanded that all the foreigners be killed in case his own people became seduced by the neighbouring gods and started worshipping them, him, her, or it—which often happened.

  Even with the assertion that the other gods demanded literal blood sacrifice, the command to kill all the people seems forensically bloody. And of course, not all the people did get killed, because we read of many marriages between tribes. Despite the order for slaughter, the people of El Shaddai married the worshippers of other gods, and this angered their anthropomorphic god. It’s all pretty primitive because they were, after all, a primitive people.

  The contradictory views of God in the early book of Scripture can be confusing—the constant demands to destroy alien nations, the bloodiness of it all. But then there breaks through a shining, as when we read in the tenth chapter of Deuteronomy,

  And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, and to love God, and to serve the Lord God with all your heart and with all your soul.