Brida

He looked at the girl's eager, trusting face. In his heart, he prayed she would understand what he had to teach her. She was, after all, his soul mate, even if she didn't yet know it, even if she was still very young and fascinated by the things and the people of this world.

In the darkness, Brida could just make out the shape of the Magus going back into the forest and disappearing among the trees to her left. She was afraid of being left there alone, but tried to remain relaxed. This was her first lesson, and she must not show that she was nervous.

"He accepted me as his pupil. I can't disappoint him."

She was pleased with herself and, at the same time, surprised at how quickly it had all happened. Not that she had ever doubted her abilities--she was proud of herself and of what had brought her there. She was sure that the Magus was somewhere nearby, watching her reactions, to see if she was capable of learning the first lesson of magic. He had spoken of courage, and so even if she felt afraid--images of the snakes and scorpions that might be living underneath that rock began to rise up from the depths of her imagination--she must be brave. In a while, he would return to teach her the first lesson.

"I'm a strong, determined woman," she repeated to herself under her breath. She was privileged to be there with that man whom other people either loved or feared. She looked back on the evening they had just spent together and recalled the moment when she had sensed a certain tenderness in his voice. "Perhaps he found me interesting. Perhaps he even wanted to make love with me." It wouldn't be a bad experience; there was, however, a strange look in his eyes.

"What an idiotic thing to think." There she was, in search of something very real--a path to knowledge--and suddenly she was thinking of herself as a mere woman. She tried not to think about it again, and it was then that she realized how much time had passed since the Magus had left her alone.

She felt the beginnings of panic; she had heard contradictory views about that man. Some said he was the most powerful Teacher they'd ever met, capable of changing the direction of the wind, of piercing the clouds, purely by the power of thought. And Brida was as fascinated as everyone else by such prodigies.

Other people, though--people on the fringes of the world of magic, who attended the same courses and classes as she did--assured her that he was a black magician and had once used his powers to destroy a man, because he had fallen in love with the man's wife. And this was why, even though he was a Teacher, he had been condemned to wander the lonely forests.

"Perhaps solitude has made his madness worse," Brida thought, and again she felt the first stirrings of panic. She may have been young, but she knew the harm that loneliness could do to people, especially as they got older. She had met people who had lost the glow of being alive because they could no longer fight against loneliness and had ended up becoming addicted to it. They were, for the most part, people who believed the world to be an undignified, inglorious place, and who spent their evenings and nights talking on and on about the mistakes others had made. They were people whom solitude had made into the judges of the world, whose verdicts were scattered to the four winds for whoever cared to listen. Perhaps 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 realized 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 the 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 night watchmen, 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 realizing 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 forward. 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.