She held out the bag containing her other clothes.
“You go ahead and see if you can get us a lift. I need to speak to someone.”
Lorens took the bag but only went a little way toward the path through the forest. The ritual was over and they were back in the world of men, with their loves, their jealousies, and their wars of conquest.
Fear had come back, too. Brida was behaving oddly.
“I don’t know if God exists,” he said to the trees around him.
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“And yet I can’t think about that now, because I, too, am face-to-face with the mystery.”
He felt he was talking in a different way, with a strange confidence he had never known he possessed. But, at that moment, he believed that the trees were listening to him.
“The people here may not understand me; they may despise my efforts, but I know that I’m as brave as they are, because I seek God even though I don’t believe in Him. If He exists, He is the God of the Brave.”
Lorens noticed that his hands were trembling slightly. The night had passed, and he had understood nothing of what went on. He knew that he had entered into a trance state, but that was all. However, the fact that his hands were shaking had nothing to do with that plunge into the Dark Night, as Brida called it.
He looked up at the sky, still full of low clouds. God was the God of the Brave. And He would understand him, because the brave are those who make decisions despite their fear, who are tormented by the Devil every step of the way and gripped by anxiety about their every action, wondering if they are right or wrong. And yet nevertheless, they act. They do so because they also believe in miracles, like the witches who had danced around the fire that night.
God might be trying to return to him through that woman who was now walking away toward another man. If she left, perhaps God would leave forever. She was his opportunity, because she knew that the best way to immerse oneself in God was through love. He didn’t want to lose the chance of getting her back.
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He took a deep breath, feeling the cold, pure air of the forest in his lungs, and he made a sacred promise to himself.
God was the God of the Brave.
Brida walked over to the Magus. They met by the fire. Words came only with difficulty.
She was the one to break the silence.
“We are on the same path.”
He nodded.
“So let us follow it together.”
“But you don’t love me,” said the Magus.
“I do love you. I don’t yet know my love for you, but I do love you. You’re my Soul Mate.”
The Magus still had a distant look in his eye. He was thinking about the Tradition of the Sun, and how one of the most important lessons of the Tradition of the Sun was Love. Love was the only bridge between the visible and the invisible known to everyone. It was the only effective language for translating the lessons that the Universe taught to human beings every day.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “I’m staying with you.”
“Your boyfriend is waiting,” replied the Magus. “I will bless your love.”
Brida looked at him, puzzled.
“No one can possess a sunset like the one we saw that evening,”
he went on. “Just as no one can possess an afternoon of rain beating against the window, or the serenity of a sleeping child, or the magical moment when the waves break on the rocks. No one can possess the beautiful things of this Earth, but we can know them
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and love them. It is through such moments that God reveals himself to mankind.
“We are not the masters of the sun or of the afternoon or of the waves or even of the vision of God, because we cannot possess ourselves.”
The Magus held out his hand to Brida and gave her a flower.
“When we first met—although it seems to me that I’ve always known you, because I can’t remember the world before that—I showed you the Dark Night. I wanted to see how you would face up to your own limitations. I knew that you were my Soul Mate, and that you would teach me everything I needed to learn—that is why God divided man and woman.”
Brida touched the flower. It seemed to her that it was the first flower she had seen in months. Spring had arrived.
“People give flowers as presents because flowers contain the true meaning of Love. Anyone who tries to possess a flower will have to watch its beauty fading. But if you simply look at a flower in a field, you will keep it forever, because the flower is part of the evening and the sunset and the smell of damp earth and the clouds on the horizon.”
Brida was looking at the flower. The Magus took it from her and returned it to the forest.
Brida’s eyes filled with tears. She was proud of her Soul Mate.
