Brida

It was light when she woke, and a beautiful sun was gilding everything around her. She felt a little cold, her clothes were grubby, but her soul was rejoicing. She had spent the whole night alone in a forest.

She looked everywhere for the Magus, knowing that she would not find him. He must be walking in the forest somewhere trying ‘to commune with God’, and perhaps wondering if the girl who’d come to see him the previous night had sufficient courage to learn the first lesson of the Tradition of the Sun.

‘I learned about the Dark Night,’ she said to the now silent forest. ‘I learned that the search for God is a Dark Night, that Faith is a Dark Night. And that’s hardly a surprise really, because for us each day is a dark night. None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, and yet still we go forwards. Because we trust. Because we have Faith.’

Or, who knows, perhaps because we just don’t see the mystery contained in the next second. Not that it mattered. What mattered was knowing that she had understood.

That every moment in life is an act of faith.

That you could choose to fill it with snakes and scorpions or with a strong protecting force.

That Faith cannot be explained. It was simply a Dark Night. And all she had to do was to accept it or not.

Brida looked at her watch and saw that it was getting late. She had to catch a bus, travel for three hours and think up some convincing excuse to give her boyfriend; he would never believe she had spent the whole night alone in a forest.

‘It’s a very difficult thing, the Tradition of the Sun!’ she shouted to the forest. ‘I have to be my own Teacher, and that isn’t what I was expecting!’

She looked at the village down below, mentally traced her path back through the woods and set off. First, though, she turned to the rock again. In a loud, joyous voice, she cried:

‘There’s one other thing. You’re a very interesting man.’

Leaning against the trunk of an old tree, the Magus watched the girl vanish into the woods. He had listened to her fears and heard her cries during the night. At one point, he had even been tempted to go over and embrace her, to shield her from her terror, saying that she didn’t need this kind of challenge.

Now he was pleased that he hadn’t, and he felt proud that the girl, in all her youthful confusion, was his Soulmate.