The Rock That Is Higher by Madeleine L'engle & Sarah Bessey

Author:Madeleine L'engle & Sarah Bessey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

I, too, am blessed with cousins, and in the South we claim each other even if the cousinship is remote. It is still a tie that is strong.

King David had cousins, nephews. His army chief of staff, Joab, was his nephew. He had close friends who remained loyal to him even when it seemed that his son, Absalom, had taken everything from him. And it was this loyalty in the end that prevailed against the ugliness of civil war. I have often wondered what kind of community David’s wives had, living together in a harem, presided over, I suspect, by Abigail, the wife who was older, wiser than the others. Without community they might have been mortal enemies. David had a marvelous way of loving people enough so that they could love each other as well as him, the king.

Friendship is powerful through the Bible, though I wouldn’t want to have friends like Job’s. Ruth, who was a forbear of Jesus, had a friendship with Naomi that was not unlike the friendship between Mary and Elizabeth.

I am also blessed with a community of friends. We meet to eat together on a regular basis, because sharing bread and wine is an essential part of community and the time when we tell our stories.

Many of the stories delight me! My friend Laryn leads conferences and often has to spend the night alone in a motel. One evening when she had finished her job and gone to her room, the phone rang. She answered. It was an obscene phone call. When the man called her a third time, Laryn, being Laryn, said earnestly, “I’m really worried about you. I think you must be very lonely. What I would like to do with you is pray with you, right now…” There was a click on the other end of the line, and no more phone calls. I find myself wondering if Laryn’s loving response didn’t make a difference to that sick person. He probably was lonely indeed, cut off from any kind of nurturing community.

It is no coincidence that the people who are most aware that they are strangers and sojourners on the earth are the people who are most able to open their doors to the stranger and to receive the blessing the stranger brings. So we should not be surprised that Jesus, despite his awareness of his own migrant condition and his need for solitude—for time to be alone with the Father—also had a close community of disciples and friends. He had no permanent address, appearing and disappearing with disconcerting suddenness. It is only when we are not rigid in our expectations of our communities and when our doors are wide open, that he may choose to come, with the stranger, into our midst.

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