It was our last night away. We wound up the mountains to the Maltrata Pass in Veracruz on our way to a hotel in Córdoba. It was very dark, though not late, and I felt my anxiety levels rise. Recent reports of hold-ups, highway robberies, on that very highway brought back a flood of memories.

The black, solitary highway. The rocks and punctured tire. The sudden shouts from the bush and a couple guns shoved in our faces.

I had been pregnant with our first at that time and somehow the thought of a repetition with now four kids in tow was semi disconcerting.

Despite the darkness, I looked out the window: my journeying activity of choice whatever the time of day. When it is light, I search for wildflowers and waterfalls. When dark, I look out for familiar constellations. But this night, the mountainsides blocked out much of anything but the occasional blinding lights of an air braking semi.

We came out of a tunnel to the other side of the mountain and into the full splendor of the trinity of creation.

The upper ether canvas of black glowed in silvery moonlight, a perfect crescent dangling as over a baby’s crib.

Out over the valley, nearly to our latitude, a thick blanket of clouds reached from mountainside to mountainside.

And beneath, the valley, twinkling good-night to the world around.

We were in the magical in-between.

The moon, for all its glory could not reach the windows of the town below and the townspeople, search as they might, were cut off from from its light. The clouds of fog and mist an impalpable barrier between silver and onyx.

The Medievals described the universe as a set of stacked spheres. Earth, in all her earthiness, was down at the bottom and the air of the birds. Next, seven spheres with a planet in each one. Then, the ether of stellar wonder. Then the Primum Mobile-nothing but something. Then– the sphere of mystery–the something else that must be beyond.

CS Lewis says in The Discarded Image:

And beyond the Primum Mobile what? The answer to this unavoidable question had been given, in its first form, by Aristotle. ‘Outside the heaven there is neither place nor void nor time. Hence whatever is there is of such a kind as not to occupy space, nor does time affect it.’ The timidity, the hushed voice, is characteristic of the best Paganism. Adopted into Christianity, the doctrine speaks loud and jubilant. What is in one sense ‘outside the heaven’ is now, in another sense, ‘the very Heaven’, caelum ipsum, and full of God, as Bernardus says. So when Dante passes that last frontier he is told, ‘We have got outside the largest corporeal thing (del maggior corpo) into that Heaven which is pure light, intellectual light, full of love’ (Paradiso, XXX, 38).

The layers were clearly there. Man, down in the Valley, groping through the darkness, illumination impossible. Yet there we were, in the middle, Christians who once knew that blinding black yet now could also bask in the light. I wanted to shout down the mountainside, “Come up, come away! There is light up here!” I couldn’t reach the moon any more than they could, but oh, the delightful, enveloping brightness.

It’s easy to slide back down the mountain, as we did, winding our way down into the city. Suddenly the moon was obscured and we, too, were below the blanket of the clouds. The magic evaporated but the poignancy of the moment has remained.

Have you been illuminated? Can you see clearly into both worlds? Do you enjoy the wonder of the glory of God, the brightness of His Person, the beauty of Holiness, the yearning for the Eternal and simultaneously mourn over the lost world around you, their penumbral living, their hopeless meanderings? This is the magic of the middle, the joy of the Christian life.

Will you permit me a gentle exhortation? Once you have been enlightened, the world will feel blacker than ever. Do not slide below the clouds! Do not allow them to mist over the glories of the eternal. Stand forever with both in view, crying down to your lost friends to come up too. There is Light enough for all.