The Caverns Of Being

I used to wonder sometimes what it would be like to have all of one's senses suddenly sucked away from oneself into the unbounded heart of a giant Void. How would that state, if I may call it so, be different from utter non-existence? And yet, that is just how I felt last night in my dream, that I was immersed in that fathomless Void where I could see, hear, and feel nothing, not even the sheer absence of my own presence.

And then, all of a sudden, I began to regain my lost senses, one by one. First, my touch, and I could feel my fingers caressing the cold sweaty palms of my right hand. And then, I heard the distant echoes of women chanting some songs somewhere far away from me. Finally, I could see a thin warm ray of comforting light flowing towards me along what looked like a long corridor.

I frantically struggled to get up on my feet and began to walk towards the light. As I peered into the forbidding semi-darkness, staring at the strange marble figures on the walls and looking up at the high vaults above me, the realisation slowly dawned upon me that I was in the massive Mediaeval Cathedral at Lyons where my mother had once taken me to as a young boy of 9.

'There', she had exclaimed, pointing out the cold Cross behind the sparse altar, 'There hangs crucified on a tree the Son of Man who gave his life for you, my dear. And there beside him, my little one, is his own mother Mary who so loved her Son and yet gave him up for the world.'

An old man in a black gown walked up to us and said, 'Ah, it is you Madeleine. We haven't seen you in these parts for a long time now. And this is your son, I presume? Is he going to become one of us some day?'

'I don't know but I wish so, Father.'

'Yes, but for that you need to have the calling, my daughter, a calling as fierce as a torrential stream in the summer rain. A mighty calling it indeed is that leads a woman to so hate her father, her mother, her brothers, and her sisters that she gives up everything in this world for the sake of that crucified Man on the altar.'

All these images came flooding back to me in my dream as I slowly walked down the corridor, one step after the other. I even smiled to myself once, and wondered what anyone who was looking at my face then would think I was dreaming about.

Finally, I was standing before the altar, once again after 45 years, an unrepentant atheist. I was surveying the wondrous Cross when something made me turned around. The pews were dark, there was nobody around in the Cathedral, the echoing voices had fallen silent, and not a whisper did I hear. And yet, I had that uncanny feeling that were was someone around me, behind me, and in front of me, enveloping me from all around. Suddenly, I heard a gentle voice, 'I am the Void in which you are submerged but which you do not recognise. Even now.'

I woke up this morning to see the warm sun streaming into my parched eyes. I looked straight into the effulgent disc of the tireless sun and was blinded for a few moments by its brilliant darkness. I looked down from my window and realised that there had been a thunderstorm the night before. There were broken branches and scattered leaves all over the wet streets where a few bedraggled beggars stood at its corners, with primordial sorrows too deep for earthly complaints.

Later that afternoon, I walked around the periphery of the University Church, trying to read the epitaphs in its graveyard. The wooden Cross at the top of the spire had been toppled over during the night's gale and was now lying down limply at the base of the chapel. In its place there was the full glory of the risen sun pouring out the loving warmth of its patient heart onto the hardened depths of the unreedemed earth.

As I stared once again into the sun, the Void began to grow ominously around me, threatening to dissolve me once again into its vast caverns from which there is no return. And yet, when I began to shiver in a great terror in front of the advancing Void, a gentle peace too descended upon me.

For a moment, but sadly only for a moment, I felt that I had been granted a fleeting foretaste of a coming future when the brokenness of the pitiless world would be overcome.