Sold into Egypt

by Madeleine L'engle

  However, if I’m upset by the judgmentalism of the extreme Christian right, I’m equally upset at the permissiveness of the more liberal left where, it would seem, almost anything goes. Some of our jargon reflects this. “Lifestyle,” for instance, is a word which came into the vocabulary only a decade or so ago, and seems to imply that we can choose any old way of life, as long as we call it our “lifestyle,” and that we are permitted—even encouraged—to act out all our feelings, no matter what they are. Believe me, if I acted out all my feelings I’d end up in jail.

  Relationship is another of my unfavourite overworked, current words. Before it came into the vocabulary we had friendship and we had love. You can have a relationship without being committed, but not friendship or love. Relationships aren’t considered fulfilled unless they end in bed; love involves every part of us, mind and spirit and body, an inseparable trinity. We need to revive friendship and love because these are human emotions. Joseph, being human, refused to have a relationship with Potiphar’s wife. Relationships help us avoid being human. But it is our human emotions which help us to face all the joys and sorrows of being human—being betrayed by one’s brothers and one’s master’s wife, being unjustly accused, working through grief, knowing moments of joy, the satisfaction of work well done, the true pleasure of being with friends, of a meal with friends (and Joseph had to eat alone).

  Probably my most unfavourite word is consumer. How did we ever let the media get away with calling us consumers!? What an ugly noun to use for a human being. Last summer forest fires consumed vast acres of forest. Greedy developers and thoughtless farmers are consuming the great rain forests in South America. Drugs consume human beings. So does disease. Consumerism connotes greed, lust, gluttony, avarice, excess, self-centeredness. Can one be a Christian and be a consumer? I doubt it.

  Do consumers ever contemplate mortality? I suspect that they shun the thought. But to be human is to be mortal. When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, he was born as all of us are born, to die. He didn’t live a long life, but in his three decades he packed all the humanness that any of us need. Of those three decades in Jesus’ life we know very little—only the stories of his birth, his visit to the Temple when he was twelve, and the short years of his ministry. But we don’t need to know more. The story is there. It is complete. And it shows us the truth about Jesus.

  My friend Tallis remarked that the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are snapshots of Jesus, and that John’s gospel is a portrait. Between them they tell us the whole story, and it is a marvellous one.

  In the four Gospels it is clear that Jesus was steeped in Hebrew Scripture, in what we call the Old Testament. He quoted from it, referred to it, and expected his hearers to understand it without explanation. We miss much of the New Testament if we are not thoroughly grounded in the Old. For the Old Testament, beginning with Genesis, is the beginning of the story, and we need to understand the beginning in order to understand that there is triumph at the end.

  ASHER

  We lived simply, but well, we sons of our father. Yes, we all had one father—four mothers, but one father, and though my mother was a concubine, I was as much a son of my father as was Reuben, his firstborn. Not as much, however, as Joseph and Benjamin, the favoured two.

  Joseph. He was intolerable. I do not miss him. Benjamin is sweet and undemanding and seems not to be aware that our father favours him over the rest of us. He does not brag, nor boast of dreams.

  He is the one most at home here in Canaan, for this is all the land he knows as home, whereas the rest of us grew up on our Grandfather Laban’s land. But here we are, where our Grandfather Isaac lived and died. Here we are, and have taken wives, sired children, prospered. This land is now our land. El, how I love this land! My land. The mountains bring peace to my soul. The valleys are lush with corn and grapes and grain.

  Our wives are sometimes jealous of the fact that we brothers are the sons of our father, that we are together in this land, that we share one God, while they have many. They call on their gods to bring the spring rains, the growing times for fruits and grains, the birth times for the young animals, and for our own children. Perhaps their gods hear.

  But now the rains have not come. The sun burns hot with death, not life. We go further and further afield with our flocks to find pasture. The grapes shrivel on the vine. We have grain stored, but it is not enough.

  At night the wives leave our tents and join together to sing and dance and call on their goddesses, but in the morning the sun rises again, hot as molten brass. Our father says that we must stop our wives from praying to alien gods. Alien to us, they say, but not to them. And our one God has sent no rain.

  The young animals die. We salt down the meat, but it is stringy and tough.

  Is God angry with us? Angry that we married wives who have other gods? Is our God not more powerful than those other gods? Did not our God make the stars that shine at night, and the moon that touches our women every month, and the sun that is now brutal in the sky by day? Can he not send rain? We have made sacrifices of our best from the flocks and from the fields. What does El want?

  I love my wife and children. My brothers and I work hard. What is wrong? Levi and Simeon scowl. Are we being punished for what they did? Or for what we did, all of us—well, not Reuben, perhaps not Judah, but all the rest of us—to Joseph? We have not told our father that it was not a wild beast who bloodied Joseph’s coat. We cannot tell our father.

  Can we tell God? Would that make a difference? To say that we sinned, sinned against our own flesh and blood? O God, we have sinned against heaven and before you and are no longer worthy to be called your sons.

  Issachar is a strong ass couching down between the sheepfolds:

  And he saw that rest was good, and the land that it was pleasant; and bowed his shoulder to bear, and became a servant under taskwork.

  GENESIS 49:14–15

  Issachar was Jacob’s ninth son, Leah’s fifth. We know that after the brothers were reconciled, Issachar and his four sons emigrated to Egypt with Jacob’s family. But so did Joseph’s other brothers. And as with most of them, we know little about Issachar.

  It is frustrating to have so little information about Joseph’s brothers. We know more about Leah’s first sons—Reuben, the compassionate one; Simeon and Levi, who slaughtered Shechem; Judah, who was honest and pragmatic. Of Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher, Issachar and Zebulun, our knowledge is scanty. Joseph is the one who engages our attention, whose progress we follow, as he moved through vicissitude and the foibles of fortune into full humanness.

  And little Benjamin: Even when he is a grown man he is referred to as little Benjamin, the youngest, the baby. When Joseph kept Simeon hostage in Egypt, and sent for Benjamin, the boy would hardly have been a boy any longer, but we still think of him as little Benjamin.

  Little Benjamin was rooted in the land of Canaan with his father. Born on the way there, he had never known the land of his grandfather Laban, where the other brothers had been born and grown up. We do well not to worry too much about the chronology of the twelve brothers. The story of Joseph is as much story as history. Jacob thought of little Benjamin as a child, and so should we—little Benjamin, Jacob’s last treasure, precious, probably overprotected. His trip to Egypt, at the command of some great, unknown lord in that distant land, was the strangest thing that had ever happened to him.

  But for his father, Jacob, it was a terrible wrench, an acute fear that he would lose Benjamin as he had lost Rachel, as he had lost (he thought) Joseph.

  Rachel was buried on the way from Laban’s land to Isaac’s. Jacob knew the place where her bones lay. Fairly frequently in my journal I referred to Saint Margaret’s graveyard and the bones of my forbears buried there. I wrote, “What does a cemetery mean nowadays? Every once in a while I have a fleeting wish that Hugh was buried over in the Goshen graveyard and that I could go visit the place of his mortal remains. But I don’t need a cemetery. His garden is the right place
for his ashes; and our life together in Crosswicks, in the apartment in New York, is more than enough of a ‘memorial’ marker. Every room is full of his presence. I can’t believe that our bodies are anything but gone when they are gone, and my hope that our soul, our us, for want of a better word, is not annihilated, is a hope, not a rigid or legalistic system of belief.”

  My parents are buried side by side in a graveyard in Florida, not little Saint Margaret’s graveyard, but a larger one, along with many of my aunts, uncles, cousins, relations, ancestors. One of my cousins, a retired physician, visits the cemetery regularly, and I know that he makes sure that the family plots are properly tended, and I am grateful, for when I go south I do not go to the graveyard. That is not where my parents are. I touch my mother when I put on the piano music she played; when I serve dinner in bowls she used; when I put flowers in her vases. My father is with me when I sit at my desk which was his desk, when I touch his books, when I look at his portrait, painted before I was born, before the war which destroyed his health, a portrait of a vibrant young man in an apple orchard in Brittany, who had just come back from an assignment in Egypt and was wearing a dashing hat he had bought there, and whose eyes are full of life and fun and depth. That portrait is an icon, as my mother’s music is an icon.

  So we come back again to the question of the soul. Where is Hugh’s Hugh? I remember looking at my father lying in his coffin when I was seventeen and thinking, “That is not Father. He is not there.” And then asking myself—and God—“Where is he?” And believing then, as I do now, deep in my inmost heart, that God still has work for us to do, and the reality of my father, of Hugh, of all that cloud of witnesses, is still real, alive in a way we can’t even begin to understand.

  But how often God speaks to us in the darkness.

  The March after Hugh’s death was bleak. I wrote,

  It has been a long, cold winter (it is snowing again today), a winter of inner and outer chill. A winter of hard work (too much out-of-town lecturing), revising the book; being grateful beyond words for family and friends. A winter of absences: Hugh’s absence; God’s absence.

  Then last week came an experience where God’s hand was so visible that it was impossible not to recognize it, and out of tragedy came shining affirmation.

  Last Friday I was scheduled to take the shuttle to Boston to speak at Simmons College Friday night and Saturday morning. I planned to spend Saturday afternoon with Danna.

  Danna was a young friend who had cancer. She had come through a double mastectomy and chemotherapy with shining faith. She lived near Boston and was a member of a prayer group that was very dear to me, young women, all of the age to have children still at home, who met together to pray, and who had avoided the many pitfalls to which prayer groups are prone.

  One of Danna’s amusing but apt suggestions was that all prayer groups should read John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. A creative idea. That book certainly points out the pitfalls of spiritual pride!

  Danna and I wrote regularly. In one letter she quoted Woody Allen. I can’t remember the exact quote, but it was something like, “Life is full of anxiety, trouble, and misery, and it is over too soon.” She added, “I love Woody.”

  In the early autumn she learned that her cancer, which was thought to be cured, had metastasized to the liver. We all knew that things were not good, but it looked as though she might have a year or so more of full living.

  So I planned, after my Saturday morning talk, to spend the afternoon with Danna, and then I was to stay over to preach on Sunday morning and take the shuttle home. I was staying with Ethel and Paul Heins, who for so many years were, one after the other, editors of Horn Book, and friends of children’s literature and its writers.

  On Wednesday I got a call saying that Danna’s condition had deteriorated, and she was in Massachusetts General Hospital, but was still looking forward to Saturday afternoon.

  On Thursday at two in the afternoon I got a call saying that Danna’s blood pressure was dropping rapidly and could I come. Now.

  I walked home, stuffed a few clothes in an overnight bag, and somehow managed to catch the 3:30 shuttle. I was met by one of the prayer group and her husband and taken directly to the hospital, where I was able to be with Danna and her husband and eldest son, and the members of the prayer group, all of whom were there, caring, praying, and all of whom mentioned God’s amazing timing in having me scheduled to be in Boston just at this time.

  Ethel and Paul were gracious and kind about having me arrive a day early—and concerned about the reason. It had been planned that Danna’s son would pick me up around ten o’clock Friday morning, but he arrived much earlier, while Ethel and Paul and I were having breakfast and we drove right to the hospital. It was apparent that Danna was dying.

  I wrote,

  It was, in a powerful way, like living through Hugh’s death all over again. But I am grateful indeed to have been privileged to have been with Danna as she left this world, and to be with her husband and son.

  I did the jobs at Simmons, preached on Sunday, and stayed to preach at Danna’s funeral on Monday. The timing was so incredible that it is impossible to put it down to coincidence. Suddenly, in death and tragedy, God was revealed.

  Danna was a person with a shining spirit, a deep gift of prayer, a merry, bubbling laugh. It is somehow right and proper that God should have chosen her dying as a vessel to reveal the love of the Maker to us all.

  Timing. We all saw God’s hand in the timing of my trip to Boston. Months later I wrote in my journal:

  Each time I write the date I am aware of the passage of time, swift as white water. Time in which strange and irrational things happen, like the deaths of Danna, Gloria, Jean. Cynth had a timely death. [I had just come from the memorial for a beloved ninety-two-year-old cousin.] The house in West Price Street (in Philadelphia) is full of memories. I wrote large chunks of The Small Rain sitting in the downstairs window seat. Before Hugh and I were married I could always call, “Is it all right if I come down for a while?” I left Touché [my dog] there while I went to be with Hugh in Washington. Sleeping in “the little room” where I have so often slept was poignant. Up early, and off to the airport. And here I am in San Antonio.

  The time in each day is precious and precarious. No one knows when some accident will shatter time, some tornado, or heart attack, or gunshot. Perhaps that is why music is so necessary, with its ordered building and structuring of time, and even when there are dissonances or odd chromatics or modulations, they emphasize the exquisite ordering of time.

  Cynth had twenty-two years more than Hugh did. Hugh had twenty years more than Danna or Jean, and well over a decade more than Gloria. How many people get ninety plus years of time that is rich and full of quality as Cynth did? Yes, we can truly say that it is quality and not duration of time that matters—and yet untimeliness is a warping of the music, or a violin string breaking in the midst of playing.

  I had expected that going back to the house on Price Street, so full of memories, that Jean’s untimely death might send another wave of grief breaking over me. But no wild sobs have come, no torrent of tears, only a few dry little grunts and groans as I am getting ready for bed. Maybe it’s that the emotions of a year ago are too intense, that they would let loose a storm, a rushing waterfall too violent to be poured through the fragile body. I am very carefully not remembering exactly what was happening a year ago today. Something deep in my body is doing the remembering that is too painful for my conscious mind.

  A friend struggling with depression said to me, “I just want things to be normal.” And I thought: What is normal? Normal is the reality of living with precariousness, of never knowing what is around the corner, when accident or death are going to strike. Normal is cooking dinner for friends in the midst of this precariousness, lighting the candles, laughing, being together. Normal is trusting that God will make meaning out of everything that happens.

  So Jacob had to let Benjamin go.


  He took the boy in his arms, holding him so tightly that the boy thought his ribs would break, and it was a long time before he understood that his father was weeping for Joseph, the brother who had so long ago been killed by some wild beast. The older brothers had brought home his bright coat stained dark with blood.

  They had lived well in Canaan. Jacob’s tents were large and comfortable. His flocks and herds had increased. The older brothers were married; their tents with their wives and children stood nearby. They were not prepared for the failure of the crops, for animals dying from hunger and thirst because the pastureland was brown and sere and wells were running dry. Benjamin had never been hungry before.

  The corn the brothers had brought back with them from Egypt was soon gone. Jacob instructed his sons to return to Egypt to buy more. But there was one condition, Judah protested—they had been told that the lord of the land would not even see them unless they brought Benjamin. “We must take Benjamin, but I will be surety for him,” Judah promised.

  So, weeping, Jacob sent them off, bearing gifts (bribes) for the great man in Egypt.

  What a strange adventure for Benjamin—his first time away from the home tents, not quite sure what had happened to his brothers in Egypt, or why they had been accused of being spies, or why Simeon was jailed there, or what the money in the bags was all about, or why the great man wanted to see him. But the anxiety of his brothers was palpable.

  To leave home, to go into the unknown, is a kind of death. Did Benjamin know that? Are all these other little deaths in life preparation for the death of the body?

  Joseph was not yet through playing cat and mouse with his brothers. Was it merely revenge, to pay them back for their betrayal of him? Or was Joseph, too, unsettled and disturbed, seeing his brothers unexpectedly after all these years? Did he, remembering his dreams of the stalks of corn bowing down before him, find the fulfilling of these dreams irresistible?