When I was a young boy, most likely six or seven, I spent a good deal of my time walking by myself through dense forests and spacious fields in the Catskill Mountains. It was in these same mountains that several centuries earlier, Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep and woke up from a twenty year slumber.
I felt perfectly at home lying on the luxurious carpets of moss that covered boulders half the size of a house. I loved the trees, the sunlight filtering through the thick pines, the wildflowers and the wildlife, but I always wondered if I was experiencing all of it. Perhaps there was a hidden world one could enter if they had a special, magical key. Maybe if I stood in a particular place or moved a certain rock, a doorway to some other world would open? I fancied myself living centuries earlier in the wood and wondered whether ghosts of the past were watching me even now.
I understand that these thoughts are common to children, but for some reason I never truly outgrew them.1 This blog with essays on undiscovered continents and multi-dimensional portals, liminal spaces, dragons, trolls and faeries and extraterrestrial life is sort of a waning expression of this thinking as I approach death and what lies beyond.
In this post I want to begin by commenting on the plotline in The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) as well as other unseen or hidden places such as the Garden of Eden, Shangri-la or Narnia. Why are children attracted to wells? Why are we all attracted to mysterious doors or caves? What happens if we enter some foreboding realm. Can we return? Will what we return to be the same as we left it? Or, perhaps we will change somehow instead?
Francis Burnett’s Masterpiece
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911) features Mary Lennox, who is a spoiled ten-year-old English girl living in colonial India. Her parents died there during a cholera epidemic. Sickly herself, she lacked proper parenting, and when she was orphaned, she was sent back home to her next of kin. Back in England, she finds herself alone on the shuttered and rundown country estate of her uncle. He spends his days overcome in grief over his late wife and has little attention or affection to offer his equally forlorn young niece, who is left to fend for herself. Angry and aloof when she arrives at the manor, she eventually becomes friends with the servants who explain what has transpired there. In short order, Mary makes two important discoveries.
The first is a secret garden that was the joy of her late aunt’s life and the place the aunt died unexpectedly. But Mary cannot locate the key to the gardendoor. Presently, she notices a friendly robin and as she watches the bird pecking at the ground, she realizes that the robin has unearthed the key she has been looking for.
Secondly, Mary discovers she has a bedridden cousin named Colin that she didn’t know of, who was living on the estate tucked out of sight. She decides to restore the garden to its former beauty and enlists the help of her cousin to do what he can in his debilitated condition. In the process of restoring the garden, Colin magically begins to heal, and when the uncle returns to the estate after an absence, he rejoices to see his son completely healed and the garden restored.
So, here is what we can surmise. The garden was a mysterious realm, but it was also an opportunity for personal growth in the children. To enter, one needed a hidden key. The fact that the garden was locked suggested that someone intended the garden to be a forbidden place. And it improved Mary’s health to some degree, but there was a radical makeover in Colin. How is this explained? Some might say that after lying in a dark and dreary chamber for months on end, the fresh air and sunshine along with exercise caused his health to improve. The novel mentions that doctors could not find anything physically wrong with Colin, and his failing health and his preoccupation with dying was a self-fulfilling prophecy that he would likely die. Neither of the children were miraculously blessed with a gift of good health. Rather, they worked to improve themselves and therefore the garden as well, and their exposure to the soil in the garden and their spiritual investment in its restoration is what worked the miracle as did the emergence of new life thanks to their efforts.
Not every locked garden, however, is a dead or dying parcel of ground like this one Mary Lennox discovered at Misselthwaite Manor, as the estate was called. In the Song of Soloman, Chapter 4 the betrothed is compared by the author to be “a locked garden”(gan na’ul or נָע֖וּל in Hebrew). Yet, the garden of Solomon’s beloved was overflowing with life, fragrance and sweet fruit but above all, fresh clean water, something that even then was a luxury. Not everyone was welcome to enter this garden because there are strong sexual insinuations here and there are some things–such as sex–that are not freely offered to anyone but the lover. And in the eventual marriage, the woman and the man will work together to engender new life themselves.
Anne Frank
But not every change can have a happy outcome. During World War II, Anne Frank, only several years older than Mary Lennox,, Anne’s family, and several others hid from the Gestapo in a secret room for 761 days before they were discovered and taken to a concentration camp where seven of the eight people (including herself) were subsequently put to death. Yet, Anne grew immensly as a person while in the secret loft. She began her incarceration as a happy-go-lucky thirteen-year-old and despite the fear, cynicism, paranoia and despair in the adults around her, she grew to have a positive view of human nature in spite of her circumstances and experienced her first love as well.
The Garden of Eden
I was reading something or other this past Easter weekend that reminded me that, according to the Bible, the Garden of Eden still exists — it was never removed from Earth eons ago, nor did it wither and die in a sin-corroded world. Instead, Genesis (3:24) tells us, Adam and Eve were expelled and God stationed a cherub and a whirling flaming sword to prevent entry into the garden and presumably access to the Tree of Life. I paused when I read that. Assuming that the Garden of Eden once existed physically, as Genesis insists, and from its location we can surmise it is in or near present-day Iraq, then how could this place escape notice in today’s world with geospatial mapping, satellite surveillance, and people exploring every nook and cranny there is? If you’ve read any of my other posts, you know that I am a student of String Theory, and this theory has the potential to answer this question in several different ways. I realize that some readers might not want to go into specifics here, but there are interesting possibilities, and if you use Artificial Intelligence regularly, your program can explain these solutions to the problem in (fairly) easy-to-understand wording. But clearly the cherub stands at a doorway separating the holiness within the garden from the sin-soaked world without. And the purpose is to prevent anything from crossing that threshold.
Shangri-la
British author James Hilton introduced the world to Shangri-La, a hidden kingdom secreted among the treacherous valleys of the Yunnan Mountains, which lie in close proximity to Tibet. His novel, Lost Horizon, written in 1933, described a land where people neither got sick nor died—a happy, utopian paradise free from the hunger of the Great Depression and the gnawing angst of the approaching world war. The fact that Hilton called it a “horizon” suggests that it was visible, though somehow inaccessible.
A group of Europeans evacuates a Chinese city during a time of rioting in the years before war breaks out in Europe. Their rickety rescue plane arrives, but the normal pilot is missing or dead. Some revolutionary has been ordered to hijack the plane, which the villain does. The plane crashes in a remote mountain range that resembles the Himalayas, and it looks like certain death for the passengers due to the elements and the remote location of the wreck. However, they are visited by a strange group of people who take them to a tropical oasis tucked away in a secret mountain valley called Shangri-La.
The leader of the passengers is a British diplomat suffering from an ulcer caused by the drums of war. When he learns of the perpetual peace in Shangri-La, he is sorely tempted to stay to escape the madness of the hour. A young woman in their party, full of idealism and life, has a deadly disease. If she returns to the world, it will kill her, but if she remains in Shangri-La, she will be cured and perhaps live for a hundred years or more.
One of the rescued individuals is a developer and entrepreneur. He sees the secret community as people who possess the fountain of youth, which he hopes to bottle and sell. Still, another wants to return home as soon as possible. The promise of immortality and outstanding health, free of disease, means nothing to him if he must remain cooped up. Here in this utopia, the focus is on spirit and spiritual development under the tutorship of a Lama.
The characters in Lost Horizon have been carefully chosen, and their personal circumstances are vitally important to the movie. For example, consider the book/movie Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose. A man is on trial, and his life is at stake. Twelve jurors are chosen to determine guilt or innocence. In real-life situations like this, one juror goes into the deliberations with his mind set on the guilt of the accused, whether there is evidence to support that or not. Another juror is firmly of the opinion that the accused is innocent. A different juror is in a hurry because there is an important basketball game about to start, and he doesn’t want to miss it. However, he will if yet a fourth juror, who wants to review the evidence and needs more time, gets his way, and so on. Somehow, everyone must put aside their competing interests.
So it is in Lost Horizon. A group of Europeans evacuates a Chinese city during a time of rioting in the years before war breaks out in Europe. Their rickety rescue plane arrives, but the normal pilot is missing or dead. Some revolutionary has been ordered to hijack the plane, which the villain does. The plane crashes in a remote mountain range that resembles the Himalayas, and it looks like certain death for the passengers due to the elements and the remote location of the wreck. However, they are visited by a strange group of people who take them to a tropical oasis tucked away in a secret mountain valley called Shangri-La.
The leader of the passengers is a British diplomat suffering from an ulcer caused by the drums of war. When he learns of the perpetual peace in Shangri-La, he is sorely tempted to stay to escape the madness of the hour. A young woman in their party, full of idealism and life, has a deadly disease. If she returns to the world, it will kill her, but if she remains in Shangri-La, she will be cured and perhaps live for a hundred years or more.
One of the rescued individuals is a developer and entrepreneur. He sees the secret community as people who possess the fountain of youth, which he hopes to bottle and sell. Still, another wants to return home as soon as possible. The promise of immortality and outstanding health, free of disease, means nothing to him if he must remain cooped up. Here in this utopia, the focus is on spirit and spiritual development under the tutorship of a Lama.
However, not everyone is cut out for this life; utopian living can be fairly bland. Sir Thomas More coined the term “Utopia” in 1516 for a book he published, which represented an ideal society. However, the Greek words he compounded—topos, meaning “place,” and ou, meaning “not” (or perhaps he intended eu, meaning “happy”)—reveal the contradiction: there is no perfect place. There is no truly happy place from which one might escape the ills and evils of the world. Even religious communities, such as Plymouth Plantation, discovered this.
These characters, amid the backdrop of the mythical Shangri-La, each navigate their personal journeys, experiencing transformation and exploring the conflict between the modern world’s chaos and the timeless peace of an ideal society.
Their interactions provide insight into the novel’s themes of escapism, the search for meaning, and the spiritual quest for a better life.
Narnia
Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was one of the more interesting and prolific writers of the twentieth century. One series of books that he wrote was called the Chronicles of Narnia. Working from the premise that all of the cosmos (i.e., the multiverse) was
corrupted and needed redemption, he speculated on what Jesus would be like in a world of talking animals mixed with people. In this case, Jesus appears as a roaring lion, probably as the animals would be more likely to identify with another beast.
During the World War II blitz of England, children were evacuated from British cities such as London, Birmingham and so on to the countryside to spare them from being casualties of war. The four Pevensie children in the series are based, in fact, on three young girls who took shelter in Lewis’s home near Oxford in September 1939. A pool, a ring, and a green door of a schoolyard are some of the alternate ways to reach this world. Different combinations of the four children matched with friends take turns visiting the country, which is likely in another dimension. Aslan the Lion is killed and is resurrected in the first book, and the remaining six volumes have various threats and rebellions of the sort we have on Earth. The last book, called The Last Battle, more or less mirrors Revelation or the eschatology of the end times.
There is grief and loss in Narnia, but also healing and restoration, the same themes we have in our world. But it is a magical kingdom with talking mice and fauns and centaurs, and children of all ages love the series.
The Allure of Doors
Mystical places and secret spaces are generally set off from the world. In our ordinary lives, these are simply doors, and there are all sorts of varieties of doors. A business professional in a city might go through fifty or more doors a day. But doorways or access points can also be something else. There are boundaries that must be crossed to access the place or space, perhaps wild rivers with treacherous currents or only by defeating ferocious gatekeepers like Cerberus or perhaps, unsympathetic secretaries. Should there exist some unusual community of life, some exotic biosphere deep within the earth, there must be a passageway to access it, else how would we know about it? In Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, it was the pipe of an inactive volcano that served as the door. In Alice Through the Looking-Glass (Lewis Carroll) it was a mirror. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, it was a wardrobe.
Doors can be welcoming or foreboding. Locking your apartment door before retiring for the night is reassuring to most of us. A glass door might likewise reassure someone concerned with what’s on the other side. A door with the number 666 on it might give someone pause before they knock. Gates and doors can protect people, such as the ancient city gates that were locked at night and during times of war. On the other hand, gates and doors can imprison people. Jesus speaks of the “Gates of Hades” (Matthew 16:18) which, strictly speaking, is the realm of the dead and not the hell that we understand is a place of punishment. In another case, a door is a barrier. In Revelation 3:20, Jesus says “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” He is referring to the door of our heart. Note that Jesus does not pick the lock, or kick the door in. He knocks. Some people described in the next verse welcome him in. Others tell him to go away. They know who he is and they don’t want to be bothered.
A closed door can create a sense of tension in a person. Maybe it is at a doctor’s office and a loved one is being examined or treated in a room on the other side of the door? Or, you hear frightful noises, a crying baby, and so on in an adjacent room. Do you open the door? Some people choose to tolerate the tension, but in other people the tension must be relieved, and opening the door does this for better or for worse.
Hamnet (2025) movie review
Hamnet is a movie based more or less on William Shakespeare’s family. He met and married his wife Anne (aka Agnes) Hathaway (1556–1623) who is portrayed as something of a forest witch, spending her time in the wood. Her favorite spot is under the dense trees where the mouth of a cave yawns. We never learn anything about the cave until the end of the movie. William and Anne eventually marry after she was likely entering the second trimester of her pregnancy carrying Shakespeare’s child. Eight years Shakespeare’s senior, Hathaway gave the Bard three children: a girl (Susanna Hall), and twins (Judith and Hamnet). Hamnet always wanted to appear in one of his father’s plays. But we see Hamnet die early in life at the age of eleven, most likely of the plague or perhaps cholera. The movie shows Hamnet with his sick twin who is dying, and he offers God a substitutionary death (Hamnet for Judith). Hamnet sickens and dies, Judith recovers miraculously, Shakespeare rushes home devastated and too late to say goodbye, and Anne remains unable to deal with her grief — she neither laughs nor smiles. Shakespeare’s extended absences to launch his career in London had already strained his relations with Anne. With the death of Hamnet, their marriage is in ruins.
At some point Anne agrees to see one of Shakespeare’s plays, called Hamlet. She understands it is about her dead son. Because Hamlet and Hamnet were names used interchangeably back then, there is some confusion. At first, Anne recoils at the ashen-colored figure that represents her son, but then the power of the script and the acting of the one playing Hamnet starts to work on her. She learns that her son could not leave this world for Hades because of his mother’s grief which anchored him to the present. In the background of the stage is a recreation of the cave in the wood, and in the final scene Hamnet is able to pass through the entrance and fade away into darkness, presumably on his way to the underworld.
This is a very powerful scene as the darkness envelops him. It portrays the power of a doorway in splendid detail.
The Kingdom of God on Earth
In the Bible, John 3:16 says “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” This is a very generous but conditional statement. It doesn’t say that everyone will be saved because of Jesus. It says that if you believe in Jesus you will be saved. So there is a minimum prerequisite. Sadly, most people in the world who have the opportunity to respond to this invitation do not.
Rivendell
I wanted to include the life and fellowship of true believers in Jesus in this post, which is a bit of a challenge to make it fit. In the early, persecuted Church, worshippers were hesitant to reveal their faith because of the threat of arrest and being sent to the arena. So, they had a secret code even as Anne had a secret key. That code was used when you met a stranger and as you talked about the weather or the current events, you would absently draw an outline of a fish in the dirt with your sandal. If the person you encountered was a Christian, he or she would likely respond in an affirmative way, otherwise your scratching would be nonsensical to them. What I’m referring to is a society within a society that is not often obvious and is at times underground. It’s made up of ordinary working people; school teachers, merchants, farmers, students, and Uber drivers to name just a few vocations. These are people who accept Jesus’s challenge to be “in” the world but not “of” the world (i.e., not conformed to the cultural norms that are often displayed at the Grammys or on TikTok or Truth Social.) Hence, in Nazis Germany, you had the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche which supported Adolph Hitler and his agenda, and the Bekennende Kirche or the Confessing Church that remained true to the Gospel.
So, what might we use as a model? You might think of a medieval monastery. It is cloistered from the world and it has a heartbeat of its own. It’s a place of spiritual growth. If you search for monasteries online today, you’ll see that they sell wine and fruit preserves and so on, so I wonder if they exist today as they did half a millennium ago. But that example is not what I mean. You might use a protestant church but that does not fit either because in many cases, the Church has been corrupted and its message of liberation and healing compromised.
I had trouble pulling together my thoughts in a meaningful way, so I consulted with a friend who suggested Rivendell as a metaphor. I’m not a Tolkien aficionado. You can ask me anything about Narnia, but Middle-earth is something of a mystery to me. As far as my research goes, this is what works with Rivendell. I do know that there wre dark days in Middle-earth which left the inhabitants of fear and confusion.
I understand Rivendell to be something of a safe place for people, even though there is grief and sorrow and occasionally violence present. Rivendell is hidden from the world. It does appear on some maps but not the more common ones, and would-be pilgrims are generally but not always led to Rivendell by Gandalf, the Dúnedain Rangers, or by the Elves. Rivendell is easily overlooked by people passing by. It “reveals itself to people meant to find it, but to others it escapes their notice.” In this regard Riverdell is like God’s gift of salvation. Who does not embrace it? Those who pointedly refuse. I’ve heard people say that they’d rather go to hell than forgive this person or that person. So they likely don’t and they likely do. Jesus tells us that it is exceedingly difficult for some wealthy people to embrace the Gospel (Matthew 19:23-24) because their money is more important to them than anything else. And there are others who just don’t care.
Rivendell is a welcoming place, a refuge thanks to the efforts of Elrond and his fellow Elves, even though Elves are not always quick to warm up to someone. Wisdom is valued in Rivendell and is freely shared and accepted. As Claude assured me, “the Elves preserve lore, heal the wounded, and maintain beauty in a world trending toward darkness — their kindness is genuine and their counsel trustworthy.”
This present darkness that has descended on our world and on the United States in particular could use this kindness and guidance.”
Footnotes
1Children up until the approximate age of seven do not understand true causality (i.e., cause and effect), so the alternative is magical thinking. Was it Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) who used the moon as an example? A child riding in a car at night sees the full moon in the night sky. The trip is several hours long and the child understands they have covered a great distance, yet the moon is still there. Young children are likely to reach one of two conclusions. They decide that the moon is alive and following them (animism) or “I make it move.” This is magic. So, children believe that wishing for something hard enough or being in close proximity to something will create the desired outcome. Magical thinking involving Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny actually serves useful functions to the young child by relieving stress and fear. Yet some vestiges of this thinking remain for the rest of the child’s life. If he becomes a professional baseball player, he may have his “lucky socks” because he feels that wearing these socks either improves his batting average or keeps his earned run average low. Architects and engineers frequently omit the thirteenth floor by skipping from twelve to fourteen. In theater, it is extremely bad luck to say “Macbeth” out loud, because that superstition is based on the premise that Shakespeare used real witches in his play, and that to mention that name invokes the attention of the now long-departed witches.
Modern psychology holds that the typical mind has two parallel “tracks.” The first is quick to decide, based on emotions and intuition, and the second is much more analytical and deliberative. An example is that many people would like to go on a shopping spree, whether to purchase clothes, a new car, or a home. This is track one thinking and it is impulsive. But given a few days to “cool off,” these purchases may ultimately be deferred because the monthly payments are too high or the person decides they don’t really need whatever has caught their attention. This is track two thinking.
Psychologists tell us that there is not a clean separation between the two lines of thought. People switch back and forth and sometimes wind up combining a little of each. Magical thinking is tied to the first track and cold, clean logic is its second track alternative.
John 3:16 says “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” This is a very generous but conditional statement. It doesn’t say that everyone will be saved because of Jesus. It says that if you believe in Jesus you will be saved. So there is a minimum prerequisite. One other interesting thing. The word “world” is translated from the Greek word κόσμον or kosmon using our alphabet. And that is an entirely accurate translation, though it depends on a very narrow use of the word kosmon. The verse could just as easily be true if it read “For God so loved the universe that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” This would mean that if there is intelligent, sentient life on another planet or in another galaxy, this could apply to them as well.
2The Greek philosophers Leucippus and his pupil Democritus (both 5th century BCE) were known as atomists. This means they divided the universe into two notions: invisible atoms and dark void. They subscribed to the usual errors of that time, such as the earth being the center of the universe, that the earth was flat, and so on. But they got the topic of atoms correct, though today we know of many subatomic particles and so on. They used the same term that John did in 3:16 because it is equally applicable to the universe as to the world. Democritus indirectly suggested that life might exist elsewhere in the cosmos. Epicurus, from roughly the same period, was much more emphatic about the possibility. Lucretius, who lived in the century before Jesus, had the same expectation that there was life among the stars. For more information, see here.
Is it arrogant to assume that civilizations across the galaxy and beyond would suffer for the sins of Adam and Eve? Perhaps, but perhaps not. There is the Fermi Paradox, for example, which asks why, given the vastness of the cosmos, we have encountered no evidence of other civilizations — one answer being that we may actually be alone. Then there is the Many Worlds hypothesis that suggests that multiple realities are created by every act we do, even deciding what color socks to wear on a given day. This under quantum theory might allow alternate outcomes to the Garden of Eden story.
