It Happened One Night

Sometime in the middle of the night at our granddaughters’ house – those nights before their birthdays – the “fairy curtain” appears.  Nadia, soon to be 10, has experienced this probably six or seven times.  When she was 3 or 4, she greeted everything new with suspicion and reserve.  So when this gossamer-thin divider appeared between the sleeping side of the house (where the bedrooms were) and the waking side, I imagine that she stopped in her tracks and just looked, eyes wide and mouth agape.  And like most little ones uncertain about anything, she looked back at her mother, smiling in complicity with her dad.  And I imagine her mother saying “Oh, Nadia, do you think it might have been the fairies that you saw in the ballet last week?”  And with that suggestion, Nadia accepted it as the Fairy Curtain, and reverently passed through it from the sleeping side of the house to the waking side, and back and forth and back and forth. 

She lives in a house where children learn from their own questions, where teaching emerges when learning is desired.  Home schooling there is a matter of feeding the native curiosity of the girls, and these days in Nadia’s house, this whole question of the unseen reality, and with it the idea of God, is in the air. Perhaps it's spring, and all of that life poking out of the soil.

What are the characteristics of the division between the holy and the commonplace for us?  Call it sacred/profane, human/divine, or natural/supernatural, how thick is the “/” between them?  Is it gossamer-thin, like the Fairy curtain at Nadia’s house?  Or is it maybe like the blanket that Clark Gable hung from the ceiling between his bed and Claudette Colbert’s in Frank Capra’s 1934 movie “It Happened One Night” in an effort to satisfy the heiress’s need for modesty?  Even as a teenager, I knew that a wall that thin was futile in keeping them apart.  Capra thought so too, and had them conversing through it easily.  Or is it a hollow-core interior door, that looks solid but could be kicked open, exposing its cardboard structure, only a show of solidity?  Or is it a solid hardwood door, or a fire-rated metal door, or one of those foot-thick drawbridge gates that took a battering ram and a long, long movie to break down?

I suppose the thickness of the separator has something to do with the relationship that we have with the holy.  For Nadia and the fairies, the gossamer is enough.  For the Huns and the Romans, the foot-thick drawbridge was not.   For Gable the divider was not really needed at all, nor was it for Colbert, except for her equally futile façade of unapproachability.  I often struggle, in writing this blog, with respecting a diversity of readers who might find gossamer too thin, or demand a blanket, or anything at hand that might spare them from the G word.  I side with Gable.  Any separation at all is silly, and a waste of an opportunity.

What’s yours like, the divider between you and whatever is beyond you?  What’s it made of?  Does it ever come down?

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.