The Sheila Variations

The Books: "Sold into Egypt: Joseph's Journey Into Human Being" (Madeleine L'Engle)

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Sold into Egypt: Joseph's Journey Into Human Being , by Madeleine L'Engle.

This is the last book in L'Engle's "Genesis Trilogy". I think it's my favorite one of the trilogy, although I love each of them. This book is the story of Joseph (you know, of the "amazing technicolor dream coat"). As always, L'Engle uses the story of Joseph being sold into Egypt as the jumping-off place for ruminations into all kinds of subjects: astronomy, grieving the death of her husband of 40 years (Hugh), creationism vs. evolution, how misguided "piety" is, how suffering can be ennobling ... It's just a really good and fulfilling read.

EXCERPT FROM Sold into Egypt: Joseph's Journey Into Human Being , by Madeleine L'Engle.

It is not a pretty story, but we are so over-familiar with it that repetition has blunted the ugliness of what the brothers did. Joseph was a spoiled adolescent; they had cause to be jealous, but not cause to do what they did. And had it not been for Reuben and Judah, they would certainly have had Joseph's blood on their hands. Had they forgotten Cain?

What a rude awakening for young Joseph. Had he suspected the depths of his older brothers' resentment? What a shock to the pampered adolescent, first to be flung into a pit, then to be sold into the hand of strangers. Who kept the money?

Sometimes terrible things are redeemed in unexpected ways. This sudden and violent separation from everything known and loved and familiar was the beginning of Joseph's growing-up. This beginning of the breaking of the pampered pet was essential to his development into a mature human being. Likely the Ishmaelites were rough with him. He was, after all, a purchase, a commercial property, and that made him a slave. At least his life was spared.

But to Jacob, to the women, Joseph was dead. Now a new and terrible grief was added to Jacob's grief over Rachel. In my journal I wrote, "Grief is different from unhappiness. In unhappiness one is stuck in time. In grief time is totally askew. Christmas at Crosswicks was only three days ago and it was years ago. Coming to Maplewood to Maria and John and the babies is a parenthesis in time ... It is time I started saying 'this winter' and stopped saying 'this summer'. 'This summer' was so fiercely intense it's hard to get out of its grip. Especially since out of its grip means out of my life with Hugh and into a new life where I'm still groping my way."

So Jacob, too, because of Joseph's death, moved into a new way of loss. How could his other sons comfort him? Did he turn to little Benjamin?

The older brothers carried the burden of what they had done, but how painfully it weighted their consciences we do not know. Reuben, it would seem, was filled with pain and regret for having failed to rescue Joseph and return him to his father. The others may have felt that they were fine fellows for having spared the braggart's life, for having sold him into Egypt rather than murdering him. In any case, life had to go on, there was work to do, flocks to tend.

And where was God, the Maker of the Universe who took Abraham out to ask him if he could count the stars, who sent the ram in the bush to spare Isaac, who wrestled with Jacob, during all this? Thoughts of God seem to be singularly absent in Jacob's sons, and if there is any sense of God at all it is the tribal god, the one god among many gods, the masculine deity who is around to help his tribe. To the casual reader this rather chauvinist figure appears to be the God of the Old Testament. Our visions of God are partial and incomplete at best. But the God who shines through the Old Testament is the mighty Creator who made the brilliance of all those stars he showed Abraham, the God of the universe.

There have been many times in history when people must have wondered what kind of God we Christians have -- for instance, when crusaders slaughtered Orthodox Christians in Constantinople; when the Spanish Inquisitors burned people at the stake for tiny differences in interpretation of faith; in Salen where a woman could be hanged as a witch if an angry neighbor accused her out of spite. Perhaps God needs less of our fierce protectiveness for his cause, and more of our love to El, to each other.

Did Simeon and Levi think they were doing God's will when they slaughtered
Shechem? Did the brothers even consider what God would think of their selling Joseph into Egypt? Did Reuben turn over his anguish to God when he was unable to save his brother? Perhaps he wanted to unburden himself to Bilhah, but whenever he even turned in the direction of Bilhah's tent his father's suspicious eyes were fixed on him. Bilhah's consolations were denied him forever.

The Books: "A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob" (Madeleine L'Engle)

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A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob , by Madeleine L'Engle.

This is the second in L'Engle's "Genesis Trilogy". Jacob, who wrestled with the angel, is the "guide" to this particular book. In it, Madeleine again contemplates how stories can reveal to us essential truths, if we listen properly. Other things covered: redemption, forgiveness, what the heck ARE angels, anyway?

Reading these books made me totally want to go back and read Genesis again.

EXCERPT FROM A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob, by Madeleine L'Engle.

In the beginning of Genesis, God affirms that the Creation is good -- very good. The Incarnation is a reaffirmation of the innate goodness of all that God has made.

Teilhard de Chardin says that "for a soul to have a body is enkosmismene."

Enkosmismene. To have our roots in the cosmos. We are like trees, drawing spiritual water through our rootedness in Creation. This is the affirmation of incarnation.

Even in time of tornado, earthquake, ice storm, our very roots are part of the entire cosmos. Surely Jacob, picking up the stone he had used for a pillow, and pouring oil on it as it became an altar, was making this same affirmation in his cry that here was the house of God. Jacob was indeed rooted in cosmos. At that moment he knew at-one-ment.

What actually happened to Jacob? Did God really speak to him in his dream of angels? Later, it was a physical angel who grappled wtih him? Is the word physical combined with angel a contradiction? Is any of this important?

As we are rooted in cosmos these images are part of the myth which the Creator gave us so that we may begin to understand something which is beyond literal interpretation by the finite human being.

On a TV interview I was asked by a clergyman if I believe that fantasy is an essential part of our understanding of the universe and our place in it, and I replied that yes, I do believe this, adding truthfully that Scripture itself is full of glorious fantasy. Yes indeed, I take the Bible too seriously to take it all literally.

The story of Job is a wrestling with deep spiritual questions rather than dry factualism. And I love it when, in the beginning of this drama, the sons of God are gathered around, speaking to God, Satan was among them. Fallen angel or no, Satan was still God's son, and at that point was still speaking with his Creator. I wonder if he is still waiting to do that, or if he has so separated himself from at-one-ment that he and his cohorts can no longer bear to be in the Presence?

And what about Ezekiel and those glorious wheels which some people think may have been UFOs? There we have our first glimpse of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. There we see the resurrection of those dry bones with living flesh, as we read the language of poetry which expands our understanding beyond its normal limitations.

The mythic interpretation is not a facile, shallow one, but an attempt to move into the deep and dazzling darkness of that truth which the fragile human mind cannot exhaustively comprehend, but can only glimpse with occasional flashes of glory.

To live with an understanding that myth is a vehicle of truth is a far more difficult way to live than literally. The mythic world makes enormous demands of us, and that may be why it is so often shunned. The greater the good we are seeking, the greater the possibilities for perversion. But that does not make God's original good any less good; it simply heightens the challenge.

I am sometimes shocked by what I read in the Bible. There is much that I am still struggling to understand, such as the horrible story in Judges of the man who divided his raped and murdered wife into twelve piece, sending one piece to each of the tribes of Israel. I still struggle with the story of the blighted fig tree. Does it mean that when Jesus asks us to do anything, he will give us the power to do it, whether we ourselves are able to do it or not? Some of the violence in both Testaments frightens me, caught up in this age of violence. But my response of shock may be a good thing, because it pushes open doors which I might otherwise be fearful of entering.

That limited literalism which demands that the Bible's poetry and story and drama and parable be taken as factual history is one of Satan's cleverest devices. If we allow ourselves to be limited to the known and the explainable, we have thereby closed ourselves off from God and mystery and revelation.

Once I remarked that I read the Bible in much the same way that I read fairy tales, and received a shocked response. But fairy tales are not superficial stories. They spring from the depths of the human being. The world of the fairy tale is to some degree the world of the psyche. Like the heroes and heroines of fairy tales, we all start on our journey, our quest, sent out on it at our baptisms. We are, all of us, male and female, the younger brother, who succeeds in the quest because, unlike the elder brother, he knows he needs help; he cannot do it because he is strong and powerful. We are all, like it or not, the elder brother, arrogant and proud. We are all, male and female, the true princess who feels the pea of injustice under all those mattresses of indifference. And we all have to come to terms with the happy ending, and this may be the most difficult part of all. Never confuse fairy tale with untruth...

I am not sure how much of the great story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is literally true, how much is history, how much is the overlapping of several stories. Did both Abraham and Isaac pretend to Abimelech that their wives were their sisters, or have the two stories mingled over the ages? Does it really matter? The mythic truths we receive from these stories enlarge our perception of the human being, and that unique being's encounters with God. When the angel of God comes to wrestle with us we must pray to be able to grapple wtih the unexpected truth that may be revealed to us. Because Jacob, later in the story, had the courage to ask for God's blessing, we may too.

If we take the Bible over-literally we may miss the truth of the poetry, the stories, the myths. Literalism can all too easily become judgmentalism, and Jesus warned us not to judge, that we might not be judged.

How difficult it is! When I worry about those who castigate me for not agreeing with them, am I in my turn falling into judgmentalism? It's hard not to. But not all the way, I hope. I don't want to wipe out those who disagree with me, consigning them to hell for all eternity. We are still God's children, together At One. Even if I am angry, upset, confused, I must still see Christ and Christ's love in those whose opinions are very different from mine, or I won't find it in those whose view fits more comfortably with mine.

Dear God. What am I looking for? Help me to look for Christ.

God can use unworthy material to accomplish magnificent purposes. Worthiness is not a criterion. One can be worthy and closed, like the Pharisees in all generations and all races, all religions, failing to understand that openness to God's revelation is first and foremost. One can be worthy and so wrapped in one's worthiness that one fails to recognize the three angels who came to Abraham, or the angel Isaac knew would pick the right wife for Jacob, or those angels ascending and descending the great ladder as Jacob lay with his head on the stone. Those three great patriarchs were unworthy, but they were open to change, change in themselves, change in their understanding of their Maker. All of them saw angels. Through them we, too, can learn to be open, not closed. We, too, can have eyes and ears open to the great challenges God offers us. This does not mean fluctuation with the winds of chance or whim, but recognizing the wind of the Holy Spirit, whose sign is always the sign of Love.

Jacob at last was at one with the angel. So may we be, too.

Jacob wrestled all his life -- with his brother Esau; with his father-in-law, Laban. But it was God with whom he really had to struggle.

The Books: "And It Was Good : Reflections on Beginnings" (Madeleine L'Engle)

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And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings, by Madeleine L'Engle.

This is the first in L'Engle's "Genesis Trilogy". Each book in the Genesis trilogy takes a story from that particular book in the Bible and - I guess I would say that L'Engle riffs on each of these stories. (Abraham, Joseph, etc.) She ponders, contemplates, she tells stories from her own life, she relates anecdotes from other people's lives, she goes back to the story in the Bible ... she is interested in discovering what she can learn, how she can grow.

Beautiful books, all three of them. I love them.

And It Was Good is the first of the trilogy.

EXCERPT FROM And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings, by Madeleine L'Engle.

The story of God's terrible demand of Abraham is unique and has unique things to tell us. How could a loving Lord, a Lord who cares about el's creatures, for whom the tiniest atom is of the utmost importance, the hair on a head, the fate of a sparrow, how could the Master of the Universe ask such an unnatural, impossible thing of Abraham?

How indeed? The question has haunted us for several thousand years. In the Middle Ages, God's demand of Abraham was often the subject of miracle and morality plays. In the beginning of Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard retells the story of Abraham and Isaac three different ways and still he reaches no conclusion; even today we cannot understand it unless God reveals its meaning to us. Our only proper response is silence, a silence that is echoed following the words from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

In Jerusalem, inside the old city, i went to the great gold mosque which the devout Jew cannot enter because the mosque is built over the place where the temple stood and no one knows exactly where the Holy of Holies was placed. The Holy of Holies is so sacred that the place where it stood so long ago may not be stepped on, even inadvertently. I went in, with my shoes off, feeling deep awe (Moses took his shoes off before the burning bush, and so must we when we approach God's holy places), and I stood in front of a great spreading rock, the rock where Abraham laid Isaac and raised his knife to kill his son, and my skin prickled. In my bare feet I stood there, lost in wonder at the magnificent incomprehensibility of the Creator, who loves us so much that he came to live with us and be part of us and die for us and rise again for us and send the Holy Spirit to comfort us. And I was, somehow, comforted by the very incomprehensibility of all that makes life creative and worth living.

The story continues:

Early the next morning Abraham cut some wood for the sacrifice, loaded his donkey, and took Isaac and two servants with him.

How must Sarah have felt? What kind of laughter was there in this? Did Abraham tell her what God had asked of him, tell her perhaps at the last moment in order to avoid her tears and protestations? Or did he just take the boy and go? Scripture says nothing, but Sarah was a mother. She had known Abraham for a long time, and there was no way he could have hidden from her the heaviness of his heart.

So perhaps she got it out of him. "Abraham, soemthing's wrong. What is it? Tell me." And then perhaps he unburdened himself. It is not good for the human creature to be alone. And what a burden that was for Abraham to carry, much heavier than for the boy. He must have told Sarah, his helpmeet.

In my ears across the centuries I can hear the echo of Sarah's cry. "God! You know nothing about being a mother!"

Our perception of God has grown and changed through the centuries, but we still have learned little about the mother in the godhead, we have focused so consistently on the father. I understand Sarah's cry, and the medieval mystics' radiant affirmation of Christ as sister, lover, All in all. We need that intuitive and casual knowing that as God is in all things, el is also in both sexes; the brittle insistence on God's femaleness is as limited as the old paternalism...

Did Isaac realize what was happening? Did he scream with terror? Did he beg to be released? Did he try to resist, to escape, to run away? Abraham

took the knife to kill his son; but the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, "Abraham! Abraham!"

He answered, "Here I am."

The angel of the Lord said, "Do not raise your hand against the boy. Do not touch him. Now I know that you have obedient reverence for God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.

You have not withheld from me. The angel is speaking in the voice of the Lord, elself.

Abraham looked up, and there he saw a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. So he went and took the ram and offered it as a sacrifice instead of his son. Abraham named the place Jehovah-jireh; and to this day the saying is: "In the moutain of the Lord it was provided."

Then the angel of the Lord called from heaven a second time to Abraham, "This is the word of the Lord: by my own self I swear: because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will bless you abundantly and greatly multiply your descendants until they are as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the sea shore.

Perhaps this story tells us more about the nature of man's understanding of God than it does about God itself. The story is staggering in its simplicity. It never falters. Its very straightforwardness, its lack of explanation is one of the most difficult things about it.

But the Bible is for me -- I repeat -- the living Word of God, although I do not need to believe that it was divinely dictated by God in a long beard and white gown (a picture of Moses, again) and written down in a moment of time by an angel scribe. It is a great story book written over a great many centures by many people. And when I call it a great story I am emphasizing that it is a great book of Truth. It is the truth by which I live. I do not understand it all, but that does not make it any less the truth.

The Books: "Walking on Water : Reflections on Faith and Art" (Madeleine L'Engle)

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Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art , by Madeleine L'Engle.

My least favorite of her religious books. Mainly because I disagree with her concerns. Or - not just that I disagree with them, that's not it. It's that I find her concerns annoying. She is very concerned with being a Christian AND being a writer. She sees "good art" as something from God, her God ... and so she has to do all of these mental calesthenics in order to see art made by atheists, or Muslims, or whatever in the same light. Uhm, Madeleine? Chill out. That's my view. I don't care if you have no religion, I don't care if you dance to the beat of the Wiccan drummer ... if your art is good, that's enough for me. She, because she is so involved in the Christian community, and runs workshops, does lectures, etc., - she is often confronted with hostility from fellow Christians towards art, artists, etc. I mean, her book A Wrinkle in Time is ALWAYS on those "books to be banned" lists, made up by unimaginative pissy prissy Christians. (Can you tell I can't stand the type?) If you actually READ Wrinkle in Time ... how could you ... why are these people SO threatened by her?? Madeleine L'Engle is an active Christian, she writes books about it, she is a wonderful THINKER about theology (not in this book, but in her other books) ... and yet, these Christian groups think she's a bit too "different", or "radical" ... she doesn't toe the line, she never says the word "Jesus" in her children's books ... she doesn't make it clear that the characters are Christians ... blah blah blah. These people are exclusionary idiots, and that book has been called "satanic". Huh? Its theme is the healing power of love. How can these people ... Oh forget it. Intolerance makes ME intolerant. The role of the artist in society has always been controversial, actors couldn't be buried in proper graveyards, etc., etc., so there are definitely really interesting issues to contemplate here, but not in the way L'Engle does it. (heh heh. It's okay, it's her book, not mine ... she can write what she wants ... but I love to rant about it.) I am baffled and angered by anti-art Christians (obviously), and I try not to think about them too much because it would take over my life, and I actually want to have a nice life, and not spend my time getting pissed off at rigid boneheads. L'Engle's husband was a very successful actor, and some bozo at a conference asked how he could call himself a Christian and still be on television. Mkay? We're talking about STUPID PEOPLE and I try not to let STUPID PEOPLE into my life. I think the question: "How can you be on television and still be a Christian" is stupid enough to not warrant an answer. L'Engle is much more forgiving and tolerant, because she has much more contact with these idiots, so she DOES feel the need to answer these questions. This book is her way of telling the Christian idiots that it's okay to be an artist as well as a Christian. That good art IS holy. I find a lot of this book annoying just in its premise. So that's obviously a problem!!

However: she's Madeleine L'Engle. My favorite. No matter what her premise, she's still got some good points to make. One of the things I actually like about this book is it is chock-full of cool anecdotes about artists through the ages.

Anyway, I've picked out a nice excerpt - one that doesn't make me want to throw the book across the room.

Here, she describes writing her young adult novels - and how so often it is almost like the book writes itself, the book ends up teaching her lessons ... she's not in charge of it, even though she wrote the damn thing! So many good writers say the same thing, and I find it very interesting to hear these stories.

EXCERPT FROM Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art , by Madeleine L'Engle.

It is a joy to be allowed to be the servant of the work. And it is a humbling and exciting thing to know that my work knows more than I do. Throughout the years there have been proofs of this, but I think I began to understand it more fully as I worked on A Wrinkle in Time, my seventh book to be published, eleventh to be written. As I tried to serve it I began to comprehend something about listening to the work, about going where it shoved me. And so the long two years of rejection slips which followed were especially difficult; it wasn't just that my work was being rejected; or, if it was, it meant that I had not even begun to serve the work.

While I was writing I'd given myself a crash course in physics, having managed in my schooling to avoid anything even remotely mathematical. I didn't get interested because I was working on a story based on the theories of contemporary, post-Newtonian physics, but because post-Newtonian physics caused me to write a story. Abot a year before I started work on Wrinkle, I discovered that higher math is easier to understand than lower math, and in reading the works of the great mathematicians and physicists I was discovering theological insights I had not found in my deteremined efforts to read theology. The discovery of physics preceded the work on the book.

So it has been a surprise and a delight to me to discover that my friends who are scientists, my son-in-law Peter, who is a theoretical chemist, my godson, John, who is an immunologist, find the science in my fantasies to be "real," and have passed them around to their friends. This is marvellous proof that my books know more than I know.

The fact that Wrinkle is deeply embedded in both theology and physics had little to do with me, and this puts me in my proper place as a servant struggling (never completely succeeding) to be faithful to the work, the work which slowly and gently tries to teach me some of what it knows. Sometimes it is years after a book is published that I discover what some of it meant. For instance, when I made the villain in Wrinkle a disembodied brain, It, that was just how the villain happened to look; I wasn't consciously realizing that brain, when it is disengaged from the heart, turns vicious. (Conversely, the heart, when it is disengaged from the brain, can become sentimental and untruthful.)

It is nothing short of miraculous that I am so often given, during the composition of a story, just what I need at the very moment that I need it. Why did I blunder into the discovery of physics just as I was ready to write Wrinkle? Why did the names of Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which come as we were driving along in the station wagon with our children?

When I was roughing out A Wind in the Door, trying to listen, I knew that something wasn't working. I had the characters, Meg and Charles Wallace and Calvin and their families; I had the cherubim, Progo; the three Mr. Jenkinses; and the snake. I couldn't hear where it wanted me to go. And at that moment my physician friend, Pat, to whom the book is dedicated, gave me two articles from the New England Medical Journal, by Lewis Thomas, on mitochondria, those strange microcosmic creatures living their own liveds within our cells, using us as their host planet, but living independently of us, with their own DNA and RNA. And there was where the story wanted me to go, away from the macrocosm and into the microcosm. What made Pat, at that specific time, give me exactly what I needed -- or what the book needed? Of course it didn't come free; it never does. With the help of my elder daughter I gave myself a crash course in cellular biology, which science didn't even exist when I was in school -- and if it had existed, I'd probably have avoided it. Hard work, that crash course, but lots of fun.

The Books: "Bright Evening Star: Mystery of the Incarnation" (Madeleine L'Engle)

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Bright Evening Star: Mystery of the Incarnation, by Madeleine L'Engle. Another in a long line of religious inspirational books. This one focuses on the "mystery of the incarnation". She writes about her own journey of religious faith - from when she was a little kid to now. The book is about God coming "down to earth" in the form of a man, but L'Engle - as always - mixes that up with stories from her own life, personal reflections, etc. I love these little books of hers - not as much as her fiction certainly - but still. I enjoy the experience of reading them.

EXCERPT FROM Bright Evening Star: Mystery of the Incarnation, by Madeleine L'Engle.

He was special even to those who failed to understand him and were frightened by him. We know from his words and actions that he was not weakling. He shocked his own family with his unconventional behavior. His sense of mission was passionate and he tried to elucidate it by telling stories, and even when he explained the stories to his friends and disciples they still didn't understand, and he wanted and expected them to understand. Sometimes it seems that th emore he explained the less he understood.

He had a robust sense of humor. Many of his parables are jokes, told to put over a point. How many times can we hear a joke and still think it's funny? What's black and white and red all over? An embarrassed zebra. A newspaper. The responses are stale with repetition. They no longer amuse or shock. We've heard Jesus' jokes too often. When he first told that story of the man with the plank of wood in his eye, wasn't it supposed to be hilarious as well as pointed? The more openly we read the Gospels, trying to listen to them freshly, the more we understand Jesus, and the more we understand how easily he was misunderstood. And the more we understand why he was feared.

What did Jesus fear? His very fearlessness antagonized the authorities. If you can make someone afraid, you have power over that person. Jesus' references to power were to the power of the Father, the Creator, something very different from human power which seeks to grasp, dominate, humiliate.

Is Jesus still feared today? Are we still trying to tame him? It doesn't work, then, or now.

Even when his immediate family criticized and misunderstood him, his disciples wanted to follow him wherever he went because they were utterly drawn to the brilliance of his love. But whenever they were tested they drew back in fear; it was too much. They were amazed at the unconventional people who were his dinner companions -- lepers, and Romans, the occupying enemy, and tax collectors, who were even worse than enemies because they collected taxes for the enemy, keeping some for themselves. He even chose one of them as a disciple, one of the Twelve.

He chose the wrong friends, people who failed to understand him and who would abandon him in the end. He did his best to reach out to the people he grew up with; were they so familiar with him that they were unable to hear him? Scripture has given us hints that some of his friends and relatives thought he was crazy and so did not believe in his miracles, or in him. But Jesus continued his loving healing, his strange way of regarding people as though everybody matters. He enjoyed his friends, but they were strange friends, not the ones his family would have chosen for him.

Luke in his Gospel was very clear about what Jesus expected (and expects):

What you want people to do to you, do also to them. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them ... Love your enemies, do good and lend, hoping for nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be children of God. For he is kind to the unthankful and evil. (from The New Zealand Prayer Book)

What did his listeners think of that? Did they like it? Do we?

Luke continues,

Therefore be merciful just as your Father also is merciful. Judge not and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven.

I need to hear and heed that over and over again.

The Books: "The Rock that is Higher: Story as Truth" (Madeleine L'Engle)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:

Next book in my religious books section is:

The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth, by Madeleine L'Engle. This is one of her many religious-themed books. In this one, she looks at the role "story" plays in our lives. How stories can guide us through life's journey, how stories can illuminate, how stories can help us find our way. She talks a lot about the stories in the Bible, but she also talks about the works of great literature - AND she talks about her own process as a writer - specifically one awful winter in 1991 when she was trying to finish a novel (Certain Women) when she got hit by a truck. Her injuries were extensive, and she fell into a funk (hard to imagine her falling into a funk - she's so positive). Her pain was terrible, she missed her dead husband, and she lost her way. Worse than all of that, she lost interest in telling her own story (the novel). The book uses that incident as the framework to look at Story, in general. The novel - Certain Women - is a re-telling of the story of King David, yet in modern-day times, using the New York theatrical world as its background. (It's a terrible book, but whatever - I love the story behind the book.)

She's my favorite writer.

EXCERPT FROM The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth, by Madeleine L'Engle.

Marilyn and I talked about Certain Women, because not only had she read this long manuscript in various versions, she had come up with the title for me. I had started out calling the book The Company of Women, from the Coverdale translation of the Psalms, and discovered that this title had already been used. When Marilyn looked through her Bible she found, in Luke's Gospel, Certain women made us astonished, and I added, from Nik's play, King David sayig to his beloved wife, Abigail, "You sound so certain." To which Abigail replies, "I am." So Certain Women is a title with a double meaning.

We talked about David, only a youngster when his story begins, out in the hills with his sheep and his harp. All through Scripture sheep are important, and when we are referred to as sheep it is not a compliment. Sheep are among the most stupid of animals! Indeed, all we, like sheep, have gone astray.

And the Good Shepherd goes out into the rain to find us and bring us home.

It is no coincidence that David comes into his story as a shepherd. It is difficult for us today to understand all the connections that the word shepherd had for people in David's world -- and in Jesus' world. We don't have a contemporary equivalent. One friend suggested the school traffic-crossing guard, the man or woman carefuly making sure that the children get across the street safely. It's a good metaphor, but not really adequate.

There's a true story I love about a house party in one of the big English country houses. Often after dinner at these parties people give recitations, sing, and use whatever talent they have to entertain the company. One year a famous actor was among the guests. I've been told he might have been Charles Laughton. When it came his turn to perform, he recited the Twenty-third Psalm, perhaps the most beloved Psalm in the Psalter. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. His rendition was magnificent, and there was much applause. At the end of the evening someone noticed a little old great aunt dozing in the corner. She was deaf as a psot and had missed most of what was going on, but she was urged to get up and recite something. In those days people used to memorize a lot of poetry! So she stood up, and in her quavery old voice she started, "The Lord is my shepherd," and went on to the end of the psalm. When she had finished there were tears in many eyes. Later one of the guests approached the famous actor. "You recited that psalm absolutely superbly. It was incomparable. So why were we so moved by that funny, little old lady?"

He replied, "I know the psalm. She knows the shepherd."

The Books: "Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols in Antarctica and Other Unexpected Places" (Madeleine L'Engle)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:

Next book in my religious books section is Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols in Antarctica and Other Unexpected Places (Wheaton Literary Series) , by Madeleine L'Engle.

Madeleine L'Engle, obviously, is a highly successful novelist - one of the most successful novelists for young adults in the history of the genre. She's spectacular. But she also has a series of other kinds of books out, and I love those too. She has 4 volumes of her "journals" out - but each one has a different theme: one is about living a creative life, one is about taking care of her mother with Alzheimer's, one is about incorporating the Bible and its teachings into your life, and the last one (my favorite) is about her marriage. But alongside of these books (called "The Crosswicks Journals Series"), she also has written a ton of religious-themed books (the best known is the Genesis Series). She must be 90 years old now, and she's still writing - but for the most part, she has only published contemplative religious books in the last ten years. I think her last novel was Troubling a Star, an addition to her Vicky Austin series - but that was quite some time ago.

Anyway, enough background. Penguins and Golden Calves is a book where she ruminates on the difference between idols and icons. The excerpt below is from that book. It's awesome. When I heard her speak, in 1996, she told this story.

EXCERPT FROM Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols in Antarctica and Other Unexpected Places (Wheaton Literary Series) , by Madeleine L'Engle.

Children are often better believers than we are. A young friend of mine who works in a day-care center one day overheard a little boy say, "I want to die," and he meant it. She swept him into her lap to try and find out what was wrong that he should feel and say such a thing ... Everything was wrong. His parents were drinking, fighting, screaming, throwing furniture. His anguish at the violence at home had focused into a terror that someone was going to come take him away in the night. My young friend said to him, "I'm going to fix that for you. I'm going to send four guardian angels, one to stand at each corner of your bed. They will spread their wings around you, and you will be enclosed in their love, and no one will be able to take you away."

The next morning when he came to the day-care center she hurried to him, asking, "How did it go last night?"

He responded very seriously, "I think we can cut down on the angel guard. One will be enough. The flapping of their wings kept me awake."

The Books: "The Screwtape Letters". (C.S. Lewis)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:

Next book in my religious books section is The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis.

If you don't know, here is the premise of this book: it is a correspondence between an old devil (literally) and his nephew Wormwood. Wormwood is new at this whole "being a devil" thing, and his uncle trains him. We only get one side of the correspondence - the uncle's side. The Screwtape Letters is a tale of temptation, and evil, and sin - Wormwood is in charge of one young huamn being's damnation. It is essential that Wormwood bring it about. His uncle sends him tip after tip: try this, try that ... It's tough, though, because of that whole "free will" thing, put onto the earth by God (referred to in this book as The Enemy). Because "free will" exists, you have to coax people to evil, you have to trick them, you have to help them turn away from the light ... But "free will" is strong and hugely problematic, if you're a devil intent on corrupting a human being's soul.

EXCERPT FROM The Screwtape Letters , by C.S. Lewis.

The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present -- either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time -- for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men's affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. Do not think lust an exception. When the present pleasure arrives, the sin (which alone interests us) is already over. The pleasure is just the part of the process which we regret and would exclude if we could do so without losing the sin; it is the part contributed by the Enemy, and therefore experienced in a Present. The sin, which is our contribution, looked forward.

To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too -- just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow's word is today's duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is now straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future -- haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth -- ready to break the Enemy's commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other -- dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

The Books: "Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith" (Anne Lamott)

Next book in my Daily Excerpt:

We're in my religious books section now.

Next book is: Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith , by Anne Lamott.

This is Lamott's book about how she "got religion", basically - but it's so much more than that. What I like so much about her writing, in this book in particular, is that she admits that she is such a MESS. She's not afraid to tell the truth about herself. It's so courageous.

In the excerpt below, she describes a particularly turbulent Ash Wednesday she had with her 7 year old son, Sam.

EXCERPT FROM Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott.

Let me start over. You see, I tried at breakfast to get Sam interested in Ash Wednesday. I made him cocoa and gave a rousing talk on what it all means. We daub our foreheads with ashes, I explained, because they remind us of how much we miss and celebrate those who have already died. The ashes remind us of the finality of death. Like the theologian said, death is God's no to all human presumption. We are sometimes like the characters in Waiting for Godot, where the only visible redemption is the eventual appearance in Act Two of four or five new leaves on the pitiful tree. On such a stage, how can we cooperate with grace? How can we open ourselves up to it? How can we make room for anything new? How can we till the field? And so people also mark themselves with ashes to show that they trust in the alchemy God can work with those ashes -- jogging us awake, moving us toward greater attention and openness and love.

Sam listened very politely to my little talk. Then when he thought I wasn't looking, he turned on the TV. I made him turn it off. I explained that in honor of Ash Wednesday we were not watching cartoons that morning. I told him he could draw if he wanted, or play with Legos. I got myself a cup of coffee and started looking at a book of photographs that someone had sent. One in particular caught my eye immediately. It was of a large Mennonite family, shot in black and white -- a husband and wife and their fifteen children gathered around a highly polished oval table, their faces clearly, eerily reflected by the burnished wood. They looked surreal and serious; you saw in those long grave faces the echoes of the Last Supper. I wanted to show the photograph to Sam. But abruptly, hideously, Alvin and the Chipmunks were singing "Achy Breaky Heart" in their nasal demon-field way -- on the TV that Sam had turned on again.

And I just lost my mind. I thought I might begin smashing things. Including Sam. I shouted at the top of my lungs, and I used the word fucking, as in "goddamn fucking TV that we're getting rid of," and I grabbed him by his pipecleaner arm and jerked him in the direction of his room, where he spent the next ten minutes crying bitter tears.

It's so awful, attacking your child. It is the worst thing I know, to shout loudly at this fifty-pound being with his huge trusting brown eyes. It's like bitch-slapping E.T.

I did what all good parents do: calmed down enough to go apologize, and beg for his forgiveness while simultaneously expressing a deep concern about his disappointing character. He said I was the meanest person on earth next to Darth Vader. I chastised myself silently while washing breakfast dishes, but then it was time for school, and I couldn't find him anywhere. I looked everywhere in the house, in closets, under beds, and finally I heard him shouting from the branches of our tree.

I coaxed him down, dropped him off at school and felt terrible all day. Everywhere i went I'd see businessmen and women marching purposefully by with holy ashes on their foreheads. I couldn't go to church until that night to get my own little ash tilak, the reminder that I was forgiven. I thought about taking Sam out of school so that I could apologize some more. But I knew just enough to keep my mitts off him. Now, at seven, he is separating from me like mad and has made it clear that I need to give him a little bit more room. I'm not even allowed to tell him I love him these days. He is quite firm on this. "You tell me you love me all the time," he explained recently, "and I don't want you to anymore."

"At all?" I said.

"I just want you to tell me that you like me."

I said I would really try. That night, when I was tucking him in, I said, "Good night, honey, I really like you a lot."

There was silence in the dark. Then he said, "I like you too, Mom."

So I didn't take him out of school. I went for several walks, and I thought about ashes. I was sad that I am an awful person, that I am the world's meanest mother. I got sadder. And I got to thinking about the ashes of the dead.

Twice I have held the ashes of people I adored -- my dad's, my friend Pammy's. Nearly twenty years ago I poured my father's into the water near Angel Island, late at night, but I was twenty-five years old and very drunk at the time and so my grief was anesthetized. When I opened the box of his ashes, I thought they would be nice and soft and, well, ashy, like the ones with which they anoint your forehead on Ash Wednesday. But they're the grittiest of elements, like not very good landscaping pebbles. As if they're made of bones or something.

I tossed a handful of Pammy's into the water way out past Golden Gate Bridge during the day, with her husband and family, when I had been sober several years. And this time I was able to see, because it was daytime and I was sober, the deeply contradictory nature of ashes -- that they are both so heavy and so light ... We tried to strew them off the side of the boat romantically, with seals barking from the rocks on shore, under a true-blue sky, but they would not cooperate. They rarely will. It's frustrating if you are hoping to have a happy ending, or at least a little closure, a movie moment when you toss them into the air and they flutter and disperse. They don't. They cling, they haunt. They get in your hair, in your eyes, in your clothes.

By the time I reached into the box of Pammy's ashes, I had had Sam, so I was able to tolerate a bit more mystery and lack of order. That's one of the gifts kids give you, because after you have a child, things come out much less orderly and rational than they did before. It's so utterly bizarre to stare into the face of one of these tiny perfect beings and to understand that you (or someone a lot like you) grew them after a sweaty little bout of sex. And then, weighing in at the approximate poundage of a medium honeydew melon, they proceed to wedge open your heart. (Also, they help you see that you are as mad as a hatter, capable of violence just because Alvin and the Chipmunks are singing when you are trying to have a nice spiritual moment thinking about ashes.)...

Sam went home after school with a friend, so I only saw him for a few minutes later, before he went off to dinner with his Big Brother Brian, as he does every Wednesday. I went to my church. The best part of the service was that we sang old hymns a capella. There were only eight of us, mostly women, some black, some white, mostly well over fifty, scarves in their hair, lipstick, faces like pansies and cats. One of the older women was in a bad mood. I found this very scary, as if I were a flight attendant with one distressed passenger who wouldn't let me help. I tried to noodge her into a better mood with flattery and a barrage of questions about her job, garden, and dog, but she was having none of it.

This was discouraging at first, until I remembered another woman at our church, very old, from the South, tiny and black, who dressed in ersatz Coco Chanel outfits, polyester sweater sets, Dacron pillbox hats. They must have come from Mervyn's and Montgomery Ward because she didn't have any money. She was always cheerful -- until she turned eighty and started going blind. She had a great deal of religious faith, and everyone assumed that she would adjust and find meaning in her loss -- meaning and then acceptance and then joy -- and we all wanted this because, let's face it, it's so inspiring and such a relief when people find a way to bear the unbearable, when you can organize things in such a way that a tiny miracle appears to have taken place and that love has once again turned out to be bigger than fear and death and blindness. But this woman would have none of it. She went into a deep depression and eventually left the church. The elders took communion to her in the afternoon on the first Sunday of the month -- homemade bread and grape juice for the sacrament, and some bread to toast later -- but she wouldn't be part of our community anymore. It must have been too annoying for everyone to be trying to manipulate her into being a better sport than she was capable of being. I always thought that was heroic of her, that it spoke of such integrity to refuse to pretend that you're doing well just to help other people deal with the fact that sometimes we face an impossible loss.

Still, on Ash Wednesday I sang, of faith and love, and repentance. We tore cloth rags in half to symbolize our repentance, our willingness to tear up the old pattern and await the new; we dipped our own fingers in ash and daubed it on our foreheads. I prayed for the stamina to bear mystery and stillness. I prayed for Sam to be able to trust me and for me to be able to trust me again, too.

When I got home, Sam was already asleep. Brian had put him to bed. I wanted to wake him up and tell him that it was OK that he wouldn't be who I tried to get him to be, that it was OK that he didn't cooperate with me all the time -- that ashes don't, old people don't, why should little boys? But I let him alone. He was in my bed when I woke up the next morning, way over on the far left, flat and still as a shaft of light. I watched him sleep. His mouth was open. Just the last few weeks, he had grown two huge front teeth, big and white as Chiclets. He was snoring loudly for such a small boy.

I thought again about that photo of the Mennonites. In the faces of those fifteen children, reflected on their dining room table, you could see the fragile ferocity of their bond: it looked like a big wind could come and blow away this field of people on the shiny polished table. And the light shining around them where they stood was so evanescent that you felt if the reflections were to go, the children would be gone, too.

More than anything else on earth, I do not want Sam ever to blow away, but you know what? He will. His ashes will stick to the fingers of someone who loves him. Maybe his ashes will blow that person into a place where things do not come out right, where things cannot be boxed up or spackled back together but where somehow he or she can see, with whatever joy can be mustered, the four or five leaves on the formerly barren tree.

"Mom?" he called out suddenly in his sleep.

"Yes," I whispered, "here I am," and he slung his arm toward the sound of my voice, out across my shoulders.

The Books: "Abraham : A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths" (Bruce Feiler)

Moving right along with my Daily Book Excerpt:

We're moving now into my religious books - an eclectic mix - more intellectual than fanatical or partisan. The next book is Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths (P.S.), by Bruce Feiler. I'm moving into my books on religion and spirituality now.

Abraham: the patriarch from the Old Testament, an ancestor shared by Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Feiler, born and raised a Jew, knows the Abrahams of his religion, but he travels through the Middle East, talking to rabbis, imams, priests, and also regular people just off the street - about their Abraham. He treats the story of Abraham and the meaning of Abraham as a whodunit, almost - he is trying to put together the pieces of thousands of years of tradition. Abraham could, possibly, unite the three religions, and yet as of now - obviously - he divides. This book is an exploration of the contradictory and possibly hopeful role Abraham could play in today's world. Part travelogue, part memoir, part history, part reporting, part Biblical analysis ... it's a thought-provoking book, one that I highly recommend.

EXCERPT FROM Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths (P.S.), by Bruce Feiler.

I had been coming to Jerusalem often in recent years. My visits were part of a larger experience of trying to understand the roots of my identity by reentering the landscape of the Bible. I did most of my traveling during a rare bubble of peace, when going from one place to another was relatively easy. Now that bubble had burst, and the world that seemed joined together by the navel was suddenly unraveling around the very same hub: East and West, Arabs and Israelis; Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Words like apocalypse, clash of civilizations, crusade, jihad resounded in the headlines. "We are in w world war," Abdul, the Arab shopkeeper had said, "a religious war, and it's based just outside my front door."

My experience in the region persuaded me that it's possible -- maybe even necessary -- to gain insight into a contemporary situation by turning away from the present and looking back to its historical source. Especially in matters of faith, even the most modern act is informed by centuries of intermingled belief, blood, and misunderstanding.

And in that conflagration, as it has for four millennia, one name echoes behind every conversation. One figure stands at the dawn of every subsequent endeavor. One individual holds the breadth of the past -- and perhaps the dimensions of the future -- in his his life story.

Abraham.

The great patriarch of the Hebrew Bible is also the spiritual forefather of the New Testatment and the grand holy architect of the Koran. Abraham is the shared ancestor of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He is the linchpin of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is the centerpiece of the battle between the West and Islamic extremists. He is the father -- in many cases, the purported biological father -- of 12 million Jews, 2 billion Christians, and 1 billion Muslims around the world. He is history's first monotheist.

And he is largely unknown.

I wanted to know him. I wanted to understand his legacy -- and his appeal. I wanted to discover how he managed to serve as the common origin for his myriad of descendants, even as they were busy shoving one another aside and claimin ghim as their own. I wanted to figure out whether he was a hopeless fount of war or a possible vessel for reconciliation.

But where could I find him? Abraham, if he existed at all, left no evidence -- no buildings or rugs or love letters to his wife. Interviewing people who knew him was out of the question, obviously; yet half the people alive claim to be descended from him. The Hebrew Bible discusses his life, but so do the New Testament and the Koran -- and they often disagree, even on basic matters. Going to places he visited, as fruitful as that has been for me and for others, also has its limitations, because Abraham's itinerary changed from generation to generation, and from religion to religion.

I would have to design an unconventional journey. If my previous experience in the region involved a journey through place -- three continents, five countries, four war zones -- this would be a journey through place and time -- three religions, four millennia, one never-ending war. I would read, travel, seek out scholars, talk to religious leaders, visit his natural domain, even go home to mine, because I quickly realized that to understand Abraham I had to understand his heirs.

And there are billions of those. Despite countless revolutions in the history of ideas, Abraham remains a defining figure for half the world's believers. Muslims invoke him daily in their prayers, as do Jews. He appears repeatedly in the Christian liturgy. The most mesmerizing story of Abraham's life -- his offering a son to God -- plays a pivotal role in the holiest week of the Christian year, at Easter. The story is recited at the start of the holiest fortnight in Judaism, on Rosh Hashanah. The episode inspires the holiest day in Islam, 'Id al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, at the climax of the Pilgrimage.

And yet the religions can't even agree on which son he tried to kill.

What they do concur in is that Abraham occupies such sacred space because he is the first person to understand that there is only one God. This is his greatest contribution to civilization and the shared endowment of the Abrahamic faiths. It gives him power but is also a flash point, as everyone wants dominion over that moment. Muhammad may be more important for Muslims, Jesus for Christians, and Moses for Jews; yet all three traditions go out of their way to link themselves to their common patriarch. It's as if Abraham were the Rock, tugging everyone to a common hearth, the highest place, the earliest place. The place closest to God. Control the Rock and you control Abraham. Control Abraham and you control the threshold to the divine.

And so I returned to Jerusalem. I came alone -- as everyone does, in a sense -- to an uncertain destination. I came because this is the best place to understand Abraham, and to understand what he revealed about God.