Down the old highway, the two-lane blacktop with the zig-zagging tar patches and a faded yellow double line, the plowed December snow piles on the shoulders, creeping in with every storm as though the winter were angry at the scar of cleared road that interrupts its dominion, out on the rolling prairie. And there’s a sign there that reads “Fairburn, 4 miles.” An arrow points to a gravel turnoff that curves away behind a snowy hill to the east.
About twenty minutes later along the highway, there’s another sign with an arrow that reads “Fairburn, 4 miles.” And after a further stretch, another sign that reads the same. No matter where we are, Fairburn is always four miles away.
Over the hills, across the running streams, the old stories say, the fair folk dwell in their eldritch places—always near and yet not quite present. Not quite breaking through, save perhaps for foundlings and abandoned lovers. A veil keeps the otherworldly from us, most of the time.
All that’s a metaphor, of course, for the human experience of the supernatural. The mystic and the celestial. The uncanny sense of a numinous order that is not quite here and yet exists nearby.
But maybe it’s less a metaphor than it seems. The fey feeling of myth and superstition has its origins in something real, just beyond the perceptible world—presences near us, watching: imps and spirits, ghosts and omens. The old world, thick with meaning. And sometimes it slips through the barriers of reason and everyday sensibility. Sometimes, somewheres, we sense other somethings.
I felt it once—like a distant piney odor, like a savory taste, like a half-heard melody—on Christmas Eve the year that I was five or six, with my chin on my hands, watching on the table a magical machine in which the rising heat of small candles twirled brass angels, lightly ringing bells as they spun with the fan above them.
And again, the Christmas season of another year, I sensed it in the wind blowing down a buffalo draw to play across a winter meadow. The stalks of dead prairie grass swayed in time to its passing. The snow’s white dust swirled along the top of the icy crusts like the trailing gowns of invisible dancers. I could hear the angels in that wind. Hear their voices breaking through a thin place in the world to proclaim something from beyond.
I once caught a whiff of the otherworldly in the fresh scent of a holly branch. I tasted it in a bite of mincemeat pie when I was eight or nine, the thick cloves and allspice overwhelming me with . . . with something, I knew not what. I heard it at midnight Mass as a teenager, when the choir and organ swept up into an oratorio and pulled me along with them.
It is such testimonies of experience, the vouchsafings of memory, that make me believe the supernatural wants to break through into nature. It hungers to see the sacramental blend with the quotidian world. And once, of course, it did, past all measure—when the king of time and space was laid to rest in a cattle shed. Born that man no more may die. Born to reconnect the link between the divine and the human, lost in the Fall.
Oh, sentiment, tradition, Victorian schmaltz, commercial exploitation: The holiday celebrating the Christ Child is swaddled with more obscuring layers than anything in human history. But Christmas still remains the thin place in the world. The mystical still comes leaking through every Advent. And if it can pierce the veil that cloaks the numinous, it can penetrate all those other layers we’ve wrapped around the news of Christ’s birth.
Come, then. Sense the otherworldly in the scent of a Christmas tree. Hear it in the sound of a Salvation Army bell, ringing in cold gloved hands on a busy city sidewalk. See it in the blue shadows between the licks of flame on a fireplace log. Taste it in the air, feel it in the wind, experience it in the sentimental almost-tears of childhood Christmas memory. Reach out your hand to grasp the almost there, the nearly present: the flame of Heaven in the cold of winter. No matter where we are, it’s always near.
