My husband hid the squirrel.
We’ve named it, the squirrel: it is a small handcrafted creature from an art fair, a part of our autumnal centerpiece in the living room. He is there every year. We’re fond of him. And, in an impish act, my husband hid it. He told me he hid it.
I looked all over the house, in every nook, cranny, and corner. I accused my husband of hiding it someplace impossible to find; he swore he hadn’t. I accused him of moving the squirrel around; he promised he didn’t. I looked and looked and looked. My husband found this all hysterical. “You’re looking right at it,” he told me more than once. I told him he was a liar.
And then, after I sent him off tonight on a trip, I settled down on the couch with my crochet. Picked up the hook. Glanced up by happenstance at the chandelier.
And there was the squirrel, tucked in neatly and staring right down at me.
I howled. I called my husband and asked him how long the squirrel had been there. “Literally the entire time,” he told me, laughing. “You ate under that chandelier, you turned it on and off, you were staring right at it most days.”
But I was not lifting my eyes up.
An astute lesson, particularly for a short person, which I very much am. My husband and I frequently have trouble instructing each other to look for things because our “eye levels” are so much different. “I was looking straight at it,” I tell him, and he has to bend down to see what I see. Or, alternatively, I have to lift my gaze heavenward to understand his view.
This is all, of course, a good reminder of everything we don’t see.
It is also a reminder that a radical shift in view is often necessary and critical to our well-being. I am an introspective naval-gazer by nature, but even I recognize I can’t live in that space. This is one reason church is so critical to me; the act of corporate worship forcibly drags me, metaphorically and literally, into a different space where God is centered and I am not.
And I am thinking of all this today on the Feast of the Archangels because the Archangels themselves are a reminder of the reality that exists beyond our ken: the cosmic and divine shape of the world in which any number of unseen goings-on matter profoundly to our seemingly mundane daily lives. We have the vision of ordinary people, but we live in a supernatural reality.
It’s odd, but from time to time I am thankful for my atheist acquaintances who note with some contempt that I worship “an invisible God” or that I believe “in some deity,” as though such a notion is arcane and bizarre in an age of reason. I am thankful because they remind me that it is, and should be, an incredible thing to worship God—to believe the things I believe. They are miraculous and doubtless strange to the ears of those who don’t believe them. The reality from which I operate is distinct, and it is defined by a universe in which virgins can become pregnant with the Son of God and God Himself can incarnate as a carpenter to wind up on a cross.
This reality—of angels and God and miracles—is not something that turns on and off like a light switch. It is always present around me. It informs what I do and say and how I act. The trouble is that on most ordinary days, I find it easy to forget all of this in the same way that I forget to look at my chandelier. I know it’s there; I use it; and yet I don’t always see it. Lifting my gaze changes everything.
It puts me in mind of my first heartbreak, when the boy I thought I would marry dumped me and I was convinced he was the only person in the world I would ever love. I cried and cried and cried and cried and thought about begging him to come back (my mother almost had to sit on me) and I carried his guitar picks around and I stared mournfully at his picture.
At one point, my mother all but dragged me out of a chair and into the yard. “Go outside,” she instructed.
I did not want to go outside. It was bright and hot, and I was tired and sad. “Why?”
“You’ll feel better,” she said. I grumbled and sulked my way outside. I sat on our back porch and stared at the sky and the fallen chestnuts and the deer munching their way through the fields. I listened to birds and twigs snapping in the woods and squirrels burying nuts.
And I felt better. I needed to step, however briefly, out of one world and into another.
My hidden squirrel was a good reminder today to step back or out or in, or move however I need to move, to see what is true—to really see it, and not look past it. To focus my noticing on the kingdom of God around me, so that it can richly move me through the mundane realities of the day to day.
