Was the Sky Always There?
My 7yo daughter asked me last week on a walk — though question
“What was there before the sky? Was the sky always there, Dad?” She said smiling from below my left elbow as we walked down Blackhorse Avenue.
Cara comes out with these profound questions and statements from time to time. One night about six months ago as I was painting the landing ceiling, being blasted in the eye by a halogen downlighter, she said from her bedroom; “Funny isn’t it dad, you need light to see, but if you have too much light you can’t see.” As I write those words I seem not to do justice to the weight of what she said. It was weighty nevertheless.
Another one was, “Dad, how did the first person get here?” I could have gone down the road of Darwinism, but that explanation is not entirely satisfactory, to me at least.
So what was there before the sky?
I struggled to come up with an answer.
“I suppose,” I said, “that a very long time ago before the earth was here there was no sky. Because we need the ground for there to be a sky, right?”
“I suppose so” she said.
It didn’t seem to satisfy and so the conversation went on for a while until we got home.
