Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth
    The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth
    The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth
    Ebook323 pages5 hours

    The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth

    By Madeleine L'Engle, Sarah Bessey and Lindsay Lackey

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes… –Madeleine L’Engle, from The Rock That Is Higher

    Story captures our hearts and feeds our imaginations. It reminds us who we are and where we came from. Story gives meaning and direction to our lives as we learn to see it as an affirmation of God’s love and truth–an acknowledgment of our longing for a rock in the midst of life’s wilderness.

    Drawing upon her own experiences, well-known tales in literature, and selected narratives from Scripture, Madeleine L’Engle gently leads the way into the glorious world of story in The Rock That Is Higher. Here she acknowledges universal human longings and considers how literature, Scripture, personal stories, and life experiences all point us toward our true home.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherConvergent Books
    Release dateSep 18, 2018
    ISBN9781524759353
    Author

    Madeleine L'Engle

    Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007) was an American author of more than sixty books, including novels for children and adults, poetry, and religious meditations. Her best-known work, A Wrinkle in Time, one of the most beloved young adult books of the twentieth century and a Newbery Medal winner, has sold more than fourteen million copies since its publication in 1962. Her other novels include A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and A Ring of Endless Light. Born in New York City, L’Engle graduated from Smith College and worked in theater, where she met her husband, actor Hugh Franklin. L’Engle documented her marriage and family life in the four-book autobiographical series, the Crosswicks Journals. She also served as librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan for more than thirty years.  

    Read more from Madeleine L'engle

    Related to The Rock That Is Higher

    Related ebooks

    Christianity For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Kindness Changes Everything

      Nov 20, 2018

      Kindness Changes Everything
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Nadia Owusu

      Dec 15, 2020

      If anyone were to ask me for recommendations of books for America’s new leaders to read before they are sworn in, this collection would be on my list. The post A Year in Reading: Nadia Owusu appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      This Is Not a Defense of the Power of Art

      Jan 25, 2018

      If you’ve never cried while reading a book or watching a movie, this essay isn’t for you. There are only three times I remember out and out weeping in response to either: As a child on the roof of my mother’s house, in my wife’s and my first apartmen

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Peak Moments

      May 26, 2020

      Peak Moments
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Incident On The Rogue River

      Jan 25, 2023

      Incident On The Rogue River
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Crystal Hana Kim

      Dec 6, 2018

      It’s easy to feel defeated these days. It takes more effort and conscious positivity to focus on the future, on the historic firsts. We elected a record number of women to the House this year, including 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ilhan Oma

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Eirinie Carson

      Aug 16, 2023

      Eirinie Carson
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      An Open Palm

      Apr 14, 2022

      An Open Palm
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Vitality of Opposing Energies: The Millions Interviews Paul Lisicky

      Mar 17, 2020

      I was very conscious of trying to write about emergency—how do people survive when they can’t take for granted they’re going to be around in the morning? The post The Vitality of Opposing Energies: The Millions Interviews Paul Lisicky appeared first

      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Nothing Is Funnier Than Unhappiness

      Apr 5, 2022

      Nothing Is Funnier Than Unhappiness
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Zoë Ruiz

      Dec 12, 2020

      “We Are Too Big for This House” inspired me to rethink form, how to work with time and space within a narrative, and interweave art criticism into a story. It’s a poem I’ll return to again and again. The post A Year in Reading: Zoë Ruiz appeared fir

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Edan Lepucki

      Dec 9, 2018

      To start, a list of the books I enjoyed very, very much: I expected to like Lydia Kiesling’s debut novel, The Golden State, not only because she is my friend, but because I only made her be my friend after reading her genius nonfiction on this very w

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Prayer for Travelers

      Jun 12, 2019

      A Prayer for Travelers
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Ashleigh Bryant Phillips

      Jun 10, 2020

      Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Life and Death in West Virginia

      Apr 5, 2019

      Life and Death in West Virginia
      19 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Reconnecting In A Time Of Isolation

      Jan 8, 2021

      Reconnecting In A Time Of Isolation
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Zak Salih

      Dec 3, 2020

      I clung to books this year for consolation, for escape, for solace, for comfort in a way I haven’t clung to them since I was an equally anxious and uncertain teenager. The post A Year in Reading: Zak Salih appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Danelle’s Journal

      May 27, 2022

      Danelle’s Journal
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Arinze Ifeakandu

      Jun 15, 2022

      Arinze Ifeakandu
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Confronting Agony

      Jan 29, 2019

      Confronting Agony
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      For Jamie Quatro, There’s ‘Something Mystical’ About Writing

      Oct 3, 2024

      Every time I read Jamie Quatro’s fiction—from her debut collection I Want to Show You More, to her 2018 novel Fire Sermon, to her short stories in the New Yorker—I experience the same edge-of-my-seat pleasure. Quatro’s characters are as alive as fles

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Absolute Mystery

      Sep 22, 2017

      I HEAR THE WORD, of course. I go to Mass some Sundays, listen to Al Green’s Greatest Gospel Hits, and have lived in or near the Bible Belt for the better part of the past decade. Even still, the word God has never quite fitted itself to my ears. And

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Casey Gerald

      Dec 14, 2018

      There’s a line in my book that reads, “I have been so many things along my curious journey: a poor boy, a nigger, a Yale man, a Harvard man, a faggot, a Christian, a crack baby (alleged), the Spawn of Satan, the Second Coming, Casey.” My reading tend

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      TWO ESSAYS from FINGER EXERCISES FOR POETS

      Nov 1, 2022

      Russian Formalists have a word, “ostranenie,” which means constantly attempting to discover new ways of looking at everyday things. There are almost always two realities rubbing up against one another in every poem, whether they are specified or not,

      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Rock That Is Higher

    4/5

    24 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Rock That Is Higher - Madeleine L'Engle

      1

      STORY AS HOMECOMING

      On the 28th of July, 1991, I was being driven from San Diego to Escondido, California, to a lecture job to which I was looking forward. It was a bright, sunny Sunday afternoon, and Sally, my driver, had just pointed out the sign to Escondido, when there was a sudden crash, a spider-webbing of the windshield, a crumpling of the engine, a tearing of pain across my body.

      A truck had run through a red light and broadsided us.

      Sally moaned, Oh, Madeleine, Madeleine.

      Sally— I breathed. I knew I had been badly hurt. I said, not out loud, Lord, is this it? Is this the end of my story, God?

      The ancient words of the Jesus Prayer, Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, surfaced in my mind. They have been with me for many years, like a deep, inner fountain. When I wake up in the night they are there—those strong, affirming words. They were with me as I sat in the crumpled car.

      Are you all right? I asked Sally.

      I think so. My ribs hurt. I did have a green light, didn’t I?

      She did.

      A man thrust his hand and a piece of paper through the window into the car. Here’s my name and phone number. I’m your witness, he said. Another man took pictures. Someone called the police and the ambulance. Help came quickly. We did not see the truck driver who hit us.

      We answered a few questions. Both of us were completely conscious. Sally was put in the ambulance on the gurney, as it seemed to the paramedics that she was the more severely injured of the two of us. I was put on a board and slid in beside her, and the ambulance took off. After a few moments I heard a little voice ask, I suppose there’s nobody to hold my hand? And almost immediately someone took our hands and put them together, and I held Sally’s hand firmly until we were taken into the hospital. What loving sensitivity on the part of an unknown paramedic!

      The University of California San Diego Hospital is an enormous teaching hospital with a fine trauma center. After a doctor examined me and asked a few questions, he said, I think you’re all right. I think we’ll be able to let you— and then he stopped. Your upper lip is wet with sweat.

      I said, I feel very strange.

      The next thing I knew I was being rolled along the hospital corridors with an oxygen mask over my face. I wasn’t all right at all.

      But the Jesus Prayer stayed with me. I was still completely conscious, and able to answer questions and to tell the doctors that I’m allergic to iodine—important, as they were going to do a CAT scan and needed to use an alternate dye. The doctors treated me as though I was an intelligent human being, capable of answering their questions, capable of asking questions. They told me, after the CAT scan, that all my vital organs had been lacerated and were bleeding—the spleen, kidneys, liver, pancreas, intestines. They would probably have to remove the spleen. They might have to remove one kidney.

      It’s an odd and unexpected way to die, I thought, but I am seventy-two years old and I’ve had a wonderful life.

      My clothes were cut off me, and a hospital gown was slid on. A gastric tube was put down my nose. I was told what some of the surgical procedures would be. We’re going to remove your spleen.

      When?

      Now.

      I was wheeled to the operating room. I asked a question about what kind of anesthesia was being used. I was answered, and then told to breathe deeply. I knew that once I went under the anesthetic I might not come out of it, not in this life. I was not afraid. The Jesus Prayer was still with me, a strong rope to which I held like a sailor fallen from a ship. If God was ready for the curtain to come down on this final act of my life’s drama, I was as ready as I was ever going to be.

      I am grateful for that feeling of readiness, for the lack of fear, for the assurance that whatever happened all would be well.

      —

      I woke up from the anesthesia. God still had work for me to do.

      —

      So was this experience all faith in Jesus and assurance of God’s love for me?

      No.

      The next two weeks were as dark as any I have known.

      My body had taken a terrible battering. The truck had hit the driver’s side of the car, and Sally had two broken ribs—miserable, but not life threatening. Why and how I sustained the injuries that nearly killed me we don’t know because it all happened so quickly that we aren’t sure what happened—except that the truck driver ran a red light and hit us.

      I lay in the Intensive Care Unit wrapped in pain and thought, Lord, if I’m going to die, that’s all right. But please let me die. If I’m going to live, help me.

      Deborah, who was to have been my boss for the week of lectures I was missing, came to see me in ICU and reported later that I was so plugged into all kinds of tubes that I was barely visible. I said to her, I’ve been lying here asking what the meaning of all this can be.

      Deborah said, When you’re well enough to leave the hospital, of course you’ll come to me. And with that great kindness she left me.

      I had one other visitor in ICU, a clergyman who was a friend of a friend of mine in New York. He came in, big and rather loud, wearing a clerical collar. He beamed at me and said, Now, if there’s anything I can do for you, anything at all, just call me. And left. No prayer. No assurance that he was with me, or that God was with me. Just call me. How on earth was I going to be able to call anybody?

      I was far from home, far from friends. At that point I was so ill that all I could do when I was awake was to keep on breathing. And breathing hurt badly, because my sternum had been bashed and bruised. Later the doctors said that my ribs had also taken a beating, and some were probably broken. Both legs were black and blue. Because of the internal bleeding my entire left side was black with bruises.

      My only prayer was the Jesus Prayer and that was there for me because it has been part of my inner rhythm for many years, the prayer that fulfills Paul’s exhortation to pray constantly, at all times and in all places.

      Time, instead of racing at its usual incomprehensible pace, crawled interminably slowly. There were no windows in ICU, so I had no way of knowing whether it was day or night. There was a large clock on the wall, but when the hands pointed to ten o’clock I had no idea whether it was ten at night or ten in the morning.

      I was moved from ICU to Intermediate Care, and eventually to a four-bed room where two television sets were blasting. There was no way for me to control volume or program. Visitors for the other patients came in and out. There was a phone by my bed and when it rang I answered it, and it was Deborah.

      Aren’t you glad to be out of ICU?

      No, I replied. It was much quieter there.

      Where are you?

      I told her, and she said, I’ll do something about that.

      Deborah had been on the board of this hospital. Within an hour I was moved to a private room. It wasn’t much quieter than the four-bed room because they were rebuilding the hospital to make it earthquake proof, and outside my windows was scaffolding on which workmen were walking back and forth with hammers, wrenches, blow torches, and loud voices. But I did not have to watch other people’s television shows.

      Once I was in the private room I learned that a network of prayers had been set up as soon as people learned of the accident. My telephone had to be unplugged because it was not where I could reach it without great effort, and I was too exhausted and in too much pain to talk. One temporary effect of the accident was that my voice was a froglike croak, not good for telephone conversations. But flowers and get-well cards poured in to tell me that people cared, and that if I could not use the phone, they could. One friend wrote, We’re supporting AT&T, but we’re really getting to know each other. And we’re all praying. So I knew that although I was still too ill to pray for myself, I was being prayed for, upheld in a wonderful web of prayer from all over the country.

      Time was a slow blur of pain. My son and daughter-in-law flew from Connecticut to San Diego to talk to the doctors and see what was going on. My elder daughter was somewhere in France with her husband, celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary; there was no way to reach them. My younger daughter and her husband were in Connecticut with their two little boys.

      When my son walked into my room, I said, Oh, Bion, the last time I was this glad to see you was the night you were born. My daughter-in-law, Laurie, is a physician. She and Bion were able to talk with the doctors and satisfy themselves that everything was being done for me that needed to be done, and that Deborah’s offer of taking me in when I was well enough to leave the hospital was a firm and good one. But delighted as I was to see these two wonderful young people, I was still too injured to enjoy visiting, and sent them off in their brief time in California to see something of San Diego. And of course they could not stay, but had to get back to Connecticut.

      So I was alone again, and as I gained a little strength I felt a terrible sense of isolation. The trauma my body had suffered wakened all my primordial fears, fear of isolation, fear of being enclosed, fear of dark. I knew that these fears were a result of the accident and that ultimately they would leave, but there was no denying the fact that they were very much with me. One of the nurses suggested that I draw the curtains across the windows to shut out the scaffolding and the workmen. But to do that would have made my small room feel like a tomb. I didn’t care about the workmen; I didn’t want to be shut in. At night I wanted the door to my room open, not only to keep from feeling enclosed, but for the light.

      Because I was no longer in critical condition I saw very little of the overworked nurses; hospitals at this late end of the century are woefully understaffed. I felt lonely, isolated, in pain. Not back into life, yet not out of it. Still too wounded to pray for myself, I was aware enough to be grateful for the prayers that supported me, for the flowers that made my sterile room a bower. I had my small travel radio-alarm clock with me, and San Diego has a good classical music station, so I could listen to music, though I was careful not to keep the radio on constantly and run down the batteries; listening time was precious.

      After a few more days I remembered the red box in the closet in my room that had in it nearly six hundred manuscript pages of the new novel on which I had been working for over two years. The draft I had with me was the seventh. Certain Women was ready to go to the publishers. I had lived with this story and with the story of King David of Jerusalem for all this time. King David, I knew, had been through periods of isolation far more terrible than mine. During wakeful periods in the night I would think that in the morning I might be strong enough to ask for my manuscript, but I was not. It seemed, in fact, that I did my best thinking about it during the long nights. I was now off morphine, so my mind was clear. It, like the rest of my body, suffered from the trauma of the accident, but it was still capable of thinking of my novel and its characters. As so often happens with my stories, the book changed radically as I worked on it. The truth of a story is what the novelist strives for, and quite often the writer is taken down strange and unexpected paths on this search.

      I had started out to write a novel about King David’s eight wives, and I realized fairly quickly that I could not put myself completely into the bodies and minds of women who lived approximately three thousand years ago in a culture completely different from ours. I needed a twentieth-century point of view. What happened was that my twentieth-century cast took over, and the story of King David and his wives became a play that Nik Green, one of the twentieth-century characters, was writing. It didn’t mean that I had to live any less with King David and his wives—and his friends and enemies and his battles and his joy in the Lord—but that this story and its marvelous truth was being approached from a different perspective. King David brought his people from the bronze age into the iron age; what age are we living in? The electronic age? It’s different. We think differently. We certainly live differently.

      Much of the research that went into the writing of the first draft ultimately was put into the enormous pile of discarded manuscript pages on which I write telephone messages for my college-going granddaughters. But I wouldn’t have missed what I learned from it. I read 1 and 2 Samuel and the beginning of 1 Kings over and over, coming to the end of David’s story, and starting again at the beginning. But where is the beginning? It starts long before David’s entry into the tale, perhaps not as far back as the birth of Samuel, but certainly as far back as Samuel’s anointing of Saul as the first king of the Jews.

      Now the problem was that the Jews had never before had a king. They had the Lord, and they had the prophets and patriarchs. They did not need a king. The Lord did not want them to have a king. When the elders of Israel came to Samuel and said, Now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have, the Lord told Samuel, They have rejected me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods. The Lord was not pleased at the people’s clamoring for a king, and el warned them, through Samuel, what would happen when they got this human king, of their own making. This king would take their sons to be soldiers and their daughters to be cooks. The king and his men would take the fields and the vineyards, and everybody would cry out because of the king they had chosen,

      and the Lord will not answer you in that day. But the people refused to listen to Samuel. No! they said. We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.

      And the Lord said to Samuel, Listen to them and give them a king.

      The story of the people of God wanting a human king is told in the seventeenth chapter of Deuteronomy, in verse 14 through the end of the chapter:

      When you enter the land the LORD your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us, be sure to appoint over you the king the LORD your God chooses. He must be from among your own brothers. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not a brother Israelite. The king, moreover, must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself….He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold. When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law, taken from that of the priests, who are Levites. It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the LORD his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees….

      What? What? Saul did not have multiple wives, but David and Solomon certainly did. And Solomon is known for his silver and gold. And if Saul, David, or Solomon wrote out a copy of the law and read it daily, we are not told about it.

      Why did they need a king when they had the Lord? They were God’s chosen. The Lord was with them wherever they went. El had traveled with them in a cloud during the day and with fire by night. El spoke directly with Moses on Mount Sinai and gave them the commandments by which they were to live. They had a heavenly king; they did not need an earthly one.

      But they wanted a king. They did not learn.

      Have we learned?

      —

      When the people wanted a king like other peoples, when they turned away from God, they were also turning from home, their real home, the kingdom of God. David himself had a vision of this kingdom, but he also suffered many times of painful homesickness, homesickness for the quiet hills where he tended his sheep, homesickness when his son Absalom turned against him, homesickness for his holy city of Jerusalem, homesickness for the Lord who had, through Samuel, anointed him king after Saul.

      In my hospital bed I was homesick. Here it was August, but I found myself thinking of Holy Week. Lonely week. The most painful part of the story. Jesus, at the end of his earthly mission, facing failure, abandonment, death.

      What kept him going? What keeps us going when we’re in the middle of the worst of it? The knowledge that we are loved by our Creator. Everybody else left Jesus. The disciples, those he had counted on to be with him to the end, all left him in the garden. No one understood who he was, what he was about, what he had come for. How many times in our lives have we faced that utter and absolute abandonment? He knew that his mission had been high, and it was in ruins about his feet.

      He stood in front of Pontius Pilate and he held to his mission and his position because of love, God’s love, which did not fail, not even when he questioned it on the cross.

      What has happened during the centuries to that God of sustaining, enduring, total love? How can we survive without it?

      I cannot. I know I live and die by the assurance that God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, and in that Word’s hour of need what pain must God have felt! Jesus was able to endure the agony of Holy Week and of the Cross only because he was never separate from the Source, and never doubted that he was loved or, at least, only for a fragment of a minute.

      My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? For our sakes Jesus went through all the suffering we may ever have to endure, and because he cried out those words we may cry them out, too. The night I knew my husband was dying I turned, as usual at bedtime, to Evening Prayer. It was the fourth of the month, and the first psalm for the evening of the fourth day is Psalm 22, and I read, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

      Don’t confuse me by saying that Jesus was merely quoting David in the Psalms. Allow me to know that Jesus was willing to go through the same kind of anguish that sooner or later comes to us all.

      This is the story that gives meaning to my life, that gave meaning to those draggingly difficult days in the hospital and if it isn’t story it doesn’t work. The life-giving, lifesaving story is true story that transcends facts.

      There’s been considerable interest lately in checking the Gospels and trying to decide what Jesus really said, what he might have said, what he surely didn’t say, and too often the result of such academic research is not illumination, but loss of story. For such academics, miracles have to go. The Resurrection has to go. The story gets edited until there’s no life left in it and there’s nothing worth believing in.

      I read a refutation of this in a magazine that went to the opposite extreme and insisted that every word in the New Testament came out of Jesus’ mouth in exactly those words (in English), which were written down after many years of oral repetition. So we’re still stuck with a literal interpretation of facts, going from one extreme to the other.

      In the hospital in San Diego I didn’t get much comfort from facts. First of all, it’s easy to believe in facts. We certainly don’t need faith, not for facts. Faith is for the part of the story that superficially isn’t believable. Virgin births? Miracles? Resurrections? Unrealistic. Childish.

      Or is it maybe not so much childish as child-hearted? Children are better believers than grown-ups, and better theologians than many academicians. One child whose sister told her that there is no Santa Claus answered calmly, That’s your problem.

      In a world where we’re brainwashed by the media into thinking that life should be easy and painless and reasonable, it is not easy or painless or reasonable to be a Christian—that is, to be one who actually dares to believe that the power that created all the galaxies, all the stars in their courses, limited that power to the powerlessness of an ordinary human baby. That’s not reasonable.

      It is equally unreasonable to believe that this ordinary baby grew into a man who was totally human and simultaneously totally divine. Who was, as the Athanasian Creed affirms, totally incomprehensible.

      But who wants a comprehensible God in the aftermath of an incomprehensible accident?

      I remembered a conference during which a man announced, I am a devout literalist. If I cannot believe that the stories in Scripture are literally and factually true, then I have to accept that there can be more than one interpretation of a story.

      Yes, I said. That’s right.

      Then how can I know which is the right one?

      Aye, there’s the rub. We can’t. But one thing I’m learning is that I do not always have to be right. Or maybe we can look at two different interpretations of a story and understand that they are both right. If I have to take every story in the Bible as literal, and capable of only one interpretation, I will lose the story.

      What a story it is! It begins with conception, with Creation, and moves on through life and death to Resurrection, and most of it is impossible in ordinary terms of provable fact. If I have to keep in the Bible only what can be proved, I’ll be left with a book of very few pages.

      —

      As July turned into August, and the August days drooped slowly by, I was grateful in the hospital for the prayer of Jesus that stayed with me, a continuing, strengthening rhythm that was as strong as my heartbeat. I was grateful that Jesus left all the good sheep and went out into the storm after the lost and strayed one. I was even grateful that he paid the workers in the vineyard the same amount of money, no matter how long they had or hadn’t worked. I was grateful for his promises to us that were either true or insane. I looked at the bruised and battered matter of my body and I was grateful that I believe that matter matters, matters to me, matters to the God who made it, and who took it on when all Love came to us as Jesus of Nazareth. I was grateful that my faith is more a matter of joy than of security. I was grateful that I still have a lot of questions that I do not expect to have answered, at least not by facts.

      There’s nothing anyone can tell me about death that’s in the realm of laboratory proof or literalism. To think about death is an act of faith, a courage that the unknown is not empty, a belief that God is Love, and Love does not create and then abandon or annihilate. I can’t prove it. Sometimes I don’t even believe it. And then hope, the deep, innate faith, surfaces.

      —

      I had been gone from home since the fifteenth of June. Those last two weeks of June were spent teaching a writers’ workshop at Mundelein College in Chicago, where I am very much at home. The first two weeks of July were at the C. S. Lewis Summer Institute in Oxford, at Keble College. Then I met my eldest daughter and her husband in London for four nights of theatre and enjoying friends, after which we had six marvelously stress-free days on a barge in Burgundy. Our one great excitement was going up in a hot air balloon at eight-thirty in the evening, floating through sunset and moonrise over fields of golden sunflowers.

      After the barge we had two nights together in Paris, and then Josephine and Alan took off to continue celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and I flew to San Diego. I had been away from home, I felt, too long, and I had a vague sense of foreboding, a wondering if I would ever be home again.

      We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.

      In literature the longing for home is found in the many stories of paradise, of the forgotten place where we once belonged. In the Judeo-Christian tradition we have the story of the Garden, the beautiful place of love and spontaneity where we

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1