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When I was four, a sound slipped into my bedroom and woke me up. It was a persistent sound of scratching on my window screen. It was an awful sound, really. Loud and grating, and given the darkness and shadowy images moving across the curtains, I suppose I could have become afraid. But I wasn’t. I was struck only with curiosity, with a kind of wonder about this noise in the darkness. I remember lying in bed imagining increasingly magical explanations for it, unaware that I was about to engage a mystery that would in some way linger with me the rest of my life.
Armed with an array of vivid possibilities, I crept out of bed and made my way through the house to my parents bed. I shook my mother’s shoulder. “Mama, there is an angel scratching against my window.”
I waited to hear what she would say.
My mother did not say “Don’t be silly, that violates the rational abstraction of the traditional worldview!” She did not say “The scratching on your window is only the wind dragging an old branch across the screen. Its nothing. Go back to bed.”
Instead, even groggy with sleep, she knew that the ability to let go and listen creatively to the world as a mythic and sacred place, that the power to listen to the humdrum and the familiar and hear the sacred possibility of music inside it is a tender, fragile thing, easily lost. So rather than douse my first foray into holy imaginings, she put her blessing on it.
She said “An Angel? Wonderful. Say Hello for me.”
”Firstlight, The Early Inspirational Writings
by Sue Monk Kidd
