Faery Lights

In the early morning, in the heavenlies I sit, Prayer Book in hand Suddenly I become conscious of faery lights dancing in the room.

That other realm is all around us, pressing against us if only we have eyes to see, but for those who have eyes to see the older realities come into view, giants, elves and unicorns, angels and dragons, and all the wonders of that other land; the true land where myths are real and we are shadows and myths. I have in mind a remark by C. S. Lewis regarding Perelandra where things are real there, that we regard as only myths here on this flat land, this land of one plane, this land of shadows where we are imprisoned by materiality.

I keep thinking of Bilbo’s advice. “It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to,” down the hill, across the fields, over the Brandywine, through the woods dark with a strange malignity and into the mountains and valleys beyond.

There in the mountains and the deep valleys is the land of giants and the valleys of the elves, the home of things seen only with visionary eyes, but real. We have our universe upside down, inside out, we think that the shadows we see are real, we knock on wood for good luck evoking through the material feel of wood a superstition that is less real than the land beyond this land of shadows.

We have forgotten that this is middle earth, and think of this only as the “real” earth, rock, stone, materiality, the land of predictable sunrises and sunsets, a flat land with no horizon where the heavens are tarnished brass, where once upon a time, in hubris, we thought that everything we thought we saw could be understood. That is a fundamental error in our thinking. This is middle earth. “The turning circle of years had spun…two hundred and three times, and then Still thirty more, since Almighty God, The King of Glory, had been born on this middle Earth of ours, light for the faithful in human form” (Elene, trans. Burton Raffel, Poems and Prose from the Old English). Here on middle earth the Son of Man was crucified and rose again, here on middle earth we fight giants, here on middle earth the angels surround us, the elves are singing in the woods, and all around us all of the land of faery comes alive.

Here on middle earth we have one foot in the heavenlies, we are surrounded by teeming life from other realms. We are resistant to it and we are afraid. We close ourselves off, but once we open our minds to see beyond the shadows, to see beyond this flat land, this one plane of being, to see beyond this three dimensional reality into that four dimensional reality we move into a land of spirit and joy. But it takes courage to go out the front door, down the hill, into the lands beyond. In the early morning light I see the faery lights dancing in room.