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Mind the Gap by E. Carson Brisson People travel. Some, as Tennyson wrote, “sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars” in search of the great Achilles. Others charter a bus to Memphis to play bingo and are back by late Saturday night. My first excursion was with kindergarten classmates to a dairy. It was a new world. Damp, green hills rose up and leaned over us from every side. The air was so wet we could touch it. There was thick, deep, black mud waiting for us, enough for everyone! The cows were huge. They had big, cow faces. They never hurried, and they didn’t hold to indoor plumbing. They smelled all milky. We loved them. They caused us to run in joyful circles and leap for no reason. Trips can change us. They have the power to wring our pre-trip ideas about a place and sometimes about ourselves right out of us. Many of our former notions may happily be replaced by new questions, fresh insights and life-long memories tucked away among the gifts, baggage tags, soiled laundry and lots of lots of newlysingle socks that follow us home. Not long ago a trip came along and took me with it. After 18 months of diligent fund-raising, six weeks of rehearsal, and endless planning, my older son and 44 of his peers from drama, orchestra, and chorus classes at his public high school traveled to London and to Edinburgh for several busy weeks of hard work and incredible fun attending and performing plays. Four gifted teachers, one talented choreographer, one tough grandmother, and four reasonably mature parents, of whom I was one, accompanied them. My favorite pre-trip notion was that there was no such thing as too many kippers for breakfast. It turns out I was wrong, quite. Each adult on the journey took direct responsibility for a smaller group of young people from the 45 total students in our entourage. In London, my little subgroup fell in love with how efficiently the subway transported us to our various destinations. We amazed and pleased ourselves by quickly navigating concourses and escalators in order to arrive at the right station at the right time. Among other things, we learned about the “gap” of just a few inches between the platforms and the underground trains that come whooshing up beside them. Frequent reminders from signs and pre-recorded voices advised all passengers to “Mind the gap” while boarding and exiting the subway cars. Later we discovered that the marvelously expressive phrase, “Mind the gap,” has earned its place above ground in the wider culture as an appropriate aphorism in situations where a moment of deliberation may make a lasting difference for the better. During our time together, the students as a group created a gap of their own between themselves and their adult chaperones. This was to be expected and was needed, and the students were not impolite about it in any way. Their gap took the form of a lovely emerald knoll about 40 yards off one of the main paths near the dorms in which we lodged at the University of Edinburgh. The knoll was within sight of the path, but not within hearing except when there was singing or laughter. The students spontaneously gathered upon the knoll any time their otherwise full schedules allowed. There, attended by an unfailing breeze and framed by a lace of light and shadow filtering down through clouds flowing swiftly by close overhead, they would sit and sing and talk and listen and weep and laugh and breathe. The adults knew about the students’ magical meeting place. We observed how important a gap it provided for them and for us. By unspoken consensus we decided not to go out to the knoll except in an emergency, and fortunately one so serious as to propel an adult across the unofficial boundary around the knoll never arose. Since we’ve been home, my older son has brought up “the knoll” several times. More than once he has asked me if I understood it. He speaks of it in hushed tones. He describes it as a hallowed place, a sanctuary, a setting in which things were received and said and sung and heard and wept and laughed that were too wonderful ever to forget. Our conversations continue.
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On that knoll the students pondered
The youngster’s words and the similar sentiments he reports from his friends bear witness that on their knoll the the sum of their mutual achievements students were lifted. The knoll became for them a place where they could freely reflect upon the wonders and chaland shared failings, and ascended lenges of their work. (In addition to attending and critiquing plays, they were presenting an edited but spirited version of the revelation that experiencing these Pippin.) On that knoll the students pondered the sum of their mutual achievements and shared failings, and ascended things together elevated them the revelation that experiencing these things together elevated them beyond the limits of both, giving their lives to each beyond the limits of both. other in a way they never imagined possible. This revelation created trust. In this trust the students reveled. Reveling, they rose. Rising, they converged. Converging, they became the beloved guests of one. They heard one. They tasted one. They sang, laughed and wept one. One was pleased to receive them. One delighted in them. One chose them. One took them by the promise of their lives and whispered into their hearts that they were created for nothing less than one. Now that they are home, a new gap has opened up in the lives of the students, a gap not of their choosing, one they mind tremendously. They miss their knoll. They want it back. They seek each other out and declare that their fund-raising and rehearsals and planning and journey will happen again, that they’ll all soon return to that same knoll and to the same unity that embraced and hosted them on it. With these hopeful declarations, they cherish their memories. And they do more. They smite with youthful vigor the unwelcome thought that their sparkling knoll might somehow fail to become the sunlit mountain of their lives. Are they right? Will their knoll pattern into a much greater and lasting height? I can hope but I cannot know. I know a knoll is no mountain. It’s not even a hill. Despite its surface diversity, the homogeneous contours of the student group ran deep. Those contours, along with being far from home, well cared for, and working hard together on an endeavor in which they believed accounted for much of the unity the individual students experienced. No serious threats, despite several passing conflicts, ever tested that unity. But be these things as they may, perhaps it’s not too great an offense to rejoice that on that little knoll for just a few moments these young women and young men did experience something imperishably beautiful: the selection out of anything less than complete belonging. This took their breath away, and gave it back. It replaced the message that they could have it all with the truth that their lives were already waiting for them as a meaningful part of it all. This was more than some of them even knew could be dreamed. And though a knoll holds only too few, things have to be born if they are ever going to grow. That is to say, by grace and by definition, in the Alpha of one the Omega of one is already present, even if only as the fragrance of those who need still to be included. For one ever seeks more one, is always composing new invitations. Anything less calling itself one is not yet one. One is contagious, incurably so. Was the knoll God’s full smile in a deeply fractured world dangerously prone to grotesque allegiances and vicious not belonging? Hardly. Out of incomprehensible loss and in good faith more than a few speak com30 pellingly of God’s smile gone missing. I mean them no disrespect, and I’m pretty sure knolls mean them no disrespect. But neither do I disrespect the testimony of these students. On their knoll they glimpsed God grinning. There in that limited and vulnerable yet nevertheless real habitat with malice toward none their spirits danced on the banks of time and drank fearlessly from the crystal springs of joy. There, for a breath or two, they were drawn into the minding of that final gap, the unspeakable wound that is the distance between heaven and earth, and experienced its healing. Ω E. Carson Brisson is associate professor of biblical languages and associate dean for academic programs.
S UMMER 2004