Like the Flowing River

And all of us applaud the lovely image he has found.

The Music Coming from the Chapel

On the day of my birthday, the universe gave me a present which I would like to share with my readers.

In the middle of a forest near the small town of Azereix, in south-west France, there is a tree-covered hill. With the temperature nudging 40degC, in a summer when nearly five thousand people have died in hospital because of the heat, we look at the fields of maize almost ruined by the drought, and we don't much feel like walking. Nevertheless, I say to my wife:

'Once, after I dropped you off at the airport, I decided to explore this forest. I found a really pretty walk. Would you like me to show you?'

Christina sees something white in the middle of the trees and asks what it is.

'It's a hermitage,' I say, and tell her that the path passes right by it, but that on the one occasion I was there, the hermitage was closed. Accustomed as we are to the mountains and the fields, we know that God is everywhere and that there is no need for us to go into a man-made building in order to find him. Often, during our long walks, we pray in silence, listening to the voice of nature, and understanding that the invisible world always manifests itself in the visible world. After a half-hour climb, the hermitage appears before us in the middle of the wood, and the usual questions arise. Who built it? Why? To which saint is it dedicated?

And as we approach, we hear music and singing, a single voice that seems to fill the air about us with joy. 'The other time I was here, there weren't any loudspeakers,' I think, finding it strange that someone should be playing music to attract visitors on such a little-used track.

But this time, the door of the hermitage is open. We go in, and it is like entering a different world: the chapel lit by the morning light; an image of the Immaculate Conception on the altar; three rows of pews; and, in one corner, in a kind of ecstasy, a young woman of about twenty, playing her guitar and singing, with her eyes fixed on the image before her.

I light three candles, as I usually do when I enter a church for the first time (one for me, one for my friends and readers, and one for my work). I look back. The young woman has noticed our presence, but she simply smiles and continues playing.

A sense of paradise seems to descend from the heavens. As if she understood what was going on in my heart, the young woman combines music with silence, now and again pausing to say a prayer.

And I am aware that I am experiencing an unforgettable moment in my life, the kind of awareness we often only have once the magic moment has passed. I am entirely in the moment, with no past, no future, merely experiencing the morning, the music, the sweetness, the unexpected prayer. I enter a state of worship and ecstasy, and gratitude for being alive. After many tears, and what seems to me an eternity, the young woman stops playing. My wife and I get up and thank her. I say that I would like to send her a present for having filled my soul with peace that morning. She says that she goes there every morning and that this is her way of praying. I insist that I would like to give her a present. She hesitates, but finally gives me the address of a convent.

The following day, I send her one of my books and, shortly afterwards, receive a reply, in which she says that she left the hermitage that day with her soul flooded with joy, because the couple who came in had shared her worship and shared, too, in the miracle of life.

In the simplicity of that small chapel, in the young woman's voice, in the morning light that filled everything, I understood once again that the greatness of God always reveals itself in the simple things.

The Devil's Pool

I'm looking at a lovely natural pool near the village of Babinda in Australia. A young Aborigine comes over to me.

'Be careful you don't slip,' he says.

The small pool is surrounded by rocks, apparently quite safe to walk on.

'This place is called the Devil's Pool,' the boy goes on. 'Many years ago, Oolona, a beautiful Aborigine girl who was married to a warrior from Babinda, fell in love with a

nother man. They fled into these mountains, but the husband found them. The lover escaped, but Oolona was murdered here in these waters. Ever since then, Oolona thinks that every man who comes near is her lost love, and she kills him with her watery embrace.'

Later on, I ask the owner of the small hotel about the Devil's Pool.

'It might just be superstition,' he says, 'but the fact is that eleven tourists have died there in the last ten years, and they were all men.'

The Solitary Piece of Coal

I read in an on-line newspaper on the internet that, on 10 June 2004, in Tokyo, a man was found dead in his pyjamas.

So far, so good. I think that most people who die in their pyjamas (a) either died in their sleep, which is a blessing, or (b) were with their family or in a hospital bed, meaning that death did not arrive suddenly, and they all had time to get used to 'the Unwanted Guest', as the Brazilian poet, Manuel Bandeira, called it.

The news item went on to say that, when he died, the man was in his bedroom. That cancels out the hospital hypothesis, leaving the possibility that he died in his sleep, without suffering, without even realizing that he wouldn't live to see the morning light again.

However, there remains one other possibility: that he was attacked and killed.

Anyone who knows Tokyo also knows that, although it is a vast city, it is also one of the safest places in the world. I remember once stopping with my Japanese publishers for a meal before driving on into the interior of Japan. All our cases were on the back seat of the car. I immediately said how dangerous this was; someone was bound to pass, see our luggage, and make off with our clothes and documents and everything else. My publisher smiled and told me not to worry; he had never known such a thing to happen in his entire life (and, indeed, nothing did happen to our luggage, although I spent the whole of supper feeling tense).

But let's go back to our dead man in pyjamas. There was no sign of struggle or violence. An official from the Metropolitan Police, in an interview with the newspaper, stated that the man had almost certainly died of a sudden heart attack. So we can also reject the murder hypothesis.

The corpse was found by the employees of a construction company on the second floor of a building in a housing development that was about to be demolished. Everything would lead us to think that our dead man in the pyjamas, having failed to find somewhere to live in one of the most densely populated and most expensive places in the world, had simply decided to live in a building where he wouldn't have to pay any rent.