the Magus had gone mad with loneliness.
A sudden noise nearby made her jump, and her heart raced. All trace of her earlier confidence vanished. She looked around – nothing. A wave of terror seemed to rise up from her belly and spread through her body.
‘I must get a grip on myself,’ she thought, but it was impossible. Images of snakes and scorpions and childhood ghosts began to appear before her. Brida was too terrified to stay calm. Another image arose: that of a powerful magician who had made a pact with the Devil and was offering her up as a sacrifice.
‘Where are you?’ she cried. She didn’t care now what impression she made on anyone. She simply wanted to get out of there.
No one answered.
‘I want to get out of here! Help me!’
There was only the forest and its strange noises. Brida felt so dizzy with fear she thought she might faint. But she mustn’t. Now that she was quite sure he was nowhere around, fainting certainly wouldn’t help matters. She must stay in control.
This thought made her aware that there was some part of her struggling to maintain control. ‘I mustn’t call out,’ she said to herself. Her shouts could attract other men who lived in that forest and men who live in forests can be more dangerous than any wild animal.
‘I have faith,’ she started to say softly. ‘I have faith in God, faith in my Guardian Angel, who brought me here, and who remains here with me. I can’t explain what he’s like, but I know he is near. I will not dash my foot against a stone.’
These last words were from a psalm she had learned as a child, and which she hadn’t thought about for years. She had been taught the psalm by her grandmother, who had died quite recently. As soon as she wished her grandmother could be there, she immediately felt a friendly presence.
She was beginning to understand that there was a big difference between danger and fear.
‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High …’ that was how the Psalm began. She realised that it was all coming back to her word for word, exactly as if her grandmother were reciting it to her now. She kept reciting for some time, without stopping, and despite her fear, she felt calmer. She had no choice: either she believed in God, in her Guardian Angel, or she despaired.
She felt a protective presence. ‘I need to believe in this presence. I don’t know how to explain it, but it exists. And it will stay with me all night, because I don’t know how to find my way out of here alone.’
When she was a child, she would sometimes wake up in the middle of night, feeling terrified. Her father would carry her to the window and show her the town where they lived. He would talk to her about the nightwatchmen, about the milkman who would already be out delivering the milk, about the baker making their daily bread. Her father was trying to drive out the monsters with which she’d filled the night and replace them with the people who kept watch over the darkness. ‘The night is just a part of the day,’ he would say.
The night is just a part of the day. Therefore she could feel as safe in the dark as she did in the light. It was the dark that had made her invoke that protective presence. She must trust it. And that trust was called Faith. No one could ever understand Faith, but Faith was what she was experiencing now, an inexplicable immersion in blackest night. It only existed because she believed in it. Miracles couldn’t be explained either, but they existed for those who believed in them.
‘He did say something about the first lesson,’ she thought, suddenly realising what was going on. The protective presence was there because she believed in it. Brida began to feel the fatigue of so many hours under tension. She began to relax again and, with each moment that passed, she felt more protected.
She had faith. And faith wouldn’t allow the forest to be peopled again with scorpions and snakes. Faith would keep her Guardian Angel awake and watching.
She leaned back against the rock again and, all unknowing, fell asleep.
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.
In the centre of Dublin there is a bookshop that specialises in occult studies. It has never advertised in newspapers or magazines; the people who go there do so on the recommendation of others, and the owner is glad to have such a select, specialist clientele.
Even so, the bookshop is always full. Brida had heard about it and finally managed to get the address from the person teaching the course on astral travel she was currently attending. She went there late one afternoon, after work, and was delighted with the place.
From then on, whenever she could, she would go there to look at the books, but she never bought any because they were all imported and very expensive. She would leaf through them, studying the designs and
