A Glimpse of Fairyland
on glory glimpsed before the Kentucky summer sunset
Have you ever had a moment when you seem to catch sight of heaven? It’s a funny thing. It’s a bursting forth, it makes you laugh and wonder and second-guess yourself, and yet you can’t help but believe it: by God, I’ve seen Him with my own eyes!
I had a moment like that last week. A glimpse of Fairyland breaking in.
After supper, my wife Molly and the big boys were around the table, our littlest was already in bed, and Molly calls me over to where she was sitting to look out in the backyard.
Come over here, come look, come over here!
I go and stand behind her, peering with my boys out the window, past the porch, across a bit of yard, to our mulberry tree, the one perfectly ripe at this very moment. The boys have been standing on crates and holding each other as high as they can stretch to grab the branches. They pull them down together, so as to greedily snatch the tree’s hand-staining treasures, like a team of boyish Winnie-the-Poohs.
There, in that very mulberry tree, flashing and glimmering and lighting, we saw a fairy. Or, as I argued later, an angel.
The summer sun, hidden behind the tree, flashed its light upon some creature, making it blaze like a tiny sun with wings, burning like a white fire, with a solid, circular center. We were jaw-struck, amazed, humbled by the sight. Even the boys were in awe of it, aware of…something. Something hard to explain.
We tried to guess what it was: perhaps a kind of moth or butterfly? Maybe a cicada with its reflective wings, or a dragonfly? It lingered in the tree, in this perfect radiance, flitting from one branch to the next, until it planted itself on one, right in our line of sight. It shimmered in its glory, for a few minutes, maybe less than that. Soon it faded, slowly at first, then all at once.
I told my boys that more than one thing can be true at the same time.
It’s something that we Christian parents have to drill into our children, and we pastors into our people. God is everywhere present and filling all things, as the Eastern Orthodox pray. Even here, where I am? Yes, we must say and believe. Even here, even now.
It can be true, materially, that there was some kind of insect reflecting the rays of the sun, which is surely a boiling collection of hydrogen gas millions of miles away. It can also be true that an angel, perhaps the one who has been assigned by God to our family, revealed himself to us. As a sheer gift, he chose to unveil a bit of heaven to us that night. A bit of beyond, right in the here and now.
Both things can be true. Not in a fanciful, wishful way, but in a factual way—just as we accept the hard material reality of bricks and bombs, so too should we joyfully acknowledge the ontological weight of heaven and hell, the entities and personalities of the spiritual world, not to mention God himself. It not only can be true, it is true, that this life is more than what we imagine in our cold and clinical secular world. It must be more. This world, this cosmos, is filled to the brim with the stuff of the spirit, and my suspicion is that we all know, in the darkest of night, that angels and their fallen counterparts exist and act, though we seldom see them.
And maybe, though I’m not quite as positive on this, fairies do too.
How fortunate for my boys that the night before we had begun reading The Golden Key by George MacDonald, the great Scottish pastor and writer of fairy tales that inspired the likes of Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien. So far in the story we have just gone into Fairyland and found a golden key, which appears at the bottom of a rainbow. There is an adventure awaiting, and mischievous fairies, I’m sure, that we will meet. But behind the story, suffused within the story, is an understanding that the atmosphere of the fairy tale, its mood, its ethics, its hopes and fears, is somehow truer and more real than the ones offered to us in our secular world. This is what GK Chesterton taught so powerfully in his book, Orthodoxy. The fairy tale holds up a fantastical mirror, a true mirror, to expose what is false in us. They fairy tale supplies truths for creatures in a fallen world, hope against the evil in our midst. He writes,
Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
I wonder, perhaps, if these moments when God lifts the veil for us, when God gives us a sight of His glory, if He is doing something similar. Reminding us of who is in charge, and of when and where we are in the great story. We are simple creatures at the end of the day. We tend to overcomplicate what is plainly true, what we know in our heart of hearts, and what my family again, through that shimmering light, was led to believe:
We’ve seen Him! There is God, creating anew, right there in our midst! There He is, burning with light!
I wonder why God does these kinds of things in the way He does. Perhaps to lead us, once again, by way of Fairyland, into the praise of our maker. Perhaps to stoke our longing for another, a coming, a better world.
Perhaps to remind us to believe and to pray: God is everywhere present and filling all things. Even in mulberry trees and Kentucky sunsets. Even in the light of boys’ eyes, who see with childish faith. Even in the hearts of their father, still looking for fairies.
Even here, even now.
Fill this world and fill us up, O Light of Lights, O Lord of Lords.
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