Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle Read Free Book Online Page B

change our lives and to renew our commitment to the Lord of Creation.
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    But how difficult it is for us not to judge; to make what, in the current jargon, is called “a value judgment”! And here we blunder into paradox again. Jesus said, “Judge not, that you be not judged.” And yet daily we must make decisions which involve judgments:
    • We had peanut-butter sandwiches yesterday because they are Tod’s favourites. Today it’s Sarah’s turn, and we’ll have bologna with lots of mustard.
    • I will not let my child take this book of fairy tales out of the library because fairy tales are untrue.
    • I will share these wonderful fairy tales with my child because they are vehicles of hidden truths.
    • I will not talk with the Roman Catholic professor lest he make me less Christian than I think I am.
    • I will not talk to the Jewish scientist in the next apartment or Hitler and the Storm Troopers might send me to a concentration camp.
    • I will not read this book because it might shake my belief in the answers I am so comfortable with.
    Zeal for thine house hath eaten me up.
    But Bertrand Russell says, “Zeal is a bad mark for a cause. Nobody has any zeal about arithmetic. It is not the vaccinationists but the antivaccinationists who generate zeal. People are zealous for a cause when they are not quite positive that it is true.”
    It is hard for us to believe now that there were antivaccinationists, when vaccinations have succeeded in wiping smallpox from the planet. It is hard for us to believe that Dr. Semmelweis was almost torn to pieces when he suggested that physicians should wash their hands before delivering babies in order to help prevent the septicemia or puerperal fever which killed so many women after childbirth. It is hard for us to believe that Bach was considered heretical when he put the thumb under instead of over the fingers on the keyboard. It is hard for us to believe that Shakespeare was considered a trivial playwright because he was too popular. But great negative zeal was expended in all of these cases.
    We all tend to make zealous judgments and thereby close ourselves off from revelation. If we feel that we already know something in its totality, then we fail to keep our ears and eyes open to that which may expand or even change that which we so zealously think we know.
    My non-Christian friends and acquaintances are zealous in what they “know” about Christianity, which bears little or no relationship to anything I believe.
    A friend of mine, Betty Beckwith, in her book,
If I Had the Wings of the Morning,
writes about taking her brain-damaged child to a Jewish doctor. He said, “You people think of us as the people who killed your Christ.” Spontaneously she replied, “Oh, no. We think of you as the people who gave him to us.”
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    In the literary world today, Christianity has pretty well replaced sex as the present pet taboo, not only because Christianity is so often distorted by Christians as well as non-Christians, but because it is too wild and free for the timid.
    How many of us really want life, life more abundant, life which does not promise any fringe benefits or early retirement plans? Life which does not promise the absence of pain, or love which is not vulnerable and open to hurt? The number of people who attempt to withdraw from life through the abuse of alcohol, tranquilizers, barbiturates is statistically shocking.
    How many of us dare to open ourselves to that truth which would make us free? Free to talk to Roman Catholics or charismatics or Jews, as Jesus was free to talk to tax collectors or publicans or Samaritans. Free to feast at the Lord’s table with those whose understanding of the Body and Blood may be a little different from ours. Free to listen to angels. Free to run across the lake when we are called.
    What is a true icon of God to one person may be blasphemy to another. And it is not possible for us flawed human beings to make absolute zealous