Читать книгу Like the Flowing River: Thoughts and Reflections - Пауло Коэльо - Страница 18

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 40°C, 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.