Into the Unknown

My amazing friend Professor Cotillion regularly photographs orbs in her beautiful 17^th-century cottage, little blobs of blue light that aren’t visible to the natural sight but appear to the camera. She’s a brave and intelligent woman and is perfectly aware of the obvious explanation that they are reflections or refractions (and that sometimes the patterning of them makes it very likely that they are), but she likes to think of them as friendly spirits, guarding the space that she’s been lucky enough to inhabit and enhance with her striking decorative gifts.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, I was in the café opposite the church, and Peter, a man in his late 60s perhaps, came over to speak to me, apologising for interrupting me. He described how, a few weeks before his wife had a stroke (from which, happily, she’s slowly recovering), he woke in the small hours of the morning to a strange white light from behind the TV and a voice which stated, firmly and definitely, ‘Do not move from where you are’. ‘Whoever you are, you’re not taking me or Elaine’, my interlocutor said – though he told me he had no sense that the presence was in any way malevolent. He didn’t feel afraid, though he did feel annoyed at being woken and disturbed. The voice repeated its instruction and the experience faded. ‘I couldn’t have moved even if I’d wanted to’, Peter went on, ‘I tried’. That puts the ‘vision’ into the familiar category of sleep paralysis, but that wasn’t really the point, I felt. I assured Peter that his experience was unusual but one many people undergo, and that the context in which it could make sense might not become clear for a long while. I wondered about the link with his wife’s illness. Peter thanked me, said he was going to go over to the church ‘to spend a few minutes with the Lord – I’ve often told him I’ll make him tea if he turns up and tells me what he’s about’, and he paid for my coffee too. (‘Can I buy you a pie, Father?’)

Over the years I’ve become much more tolerant of these experiences which one might term paranormal. You can see how they might get such a grip of a vulnerable soul that they might need to be gently prised away from them, have it pointed out that they are not rational and they shouldn’t base their life around them; but at the same time, if I believe that human beings are immensely complex, that we are holistic structures, and that therefore our subconscious mind can communicate with us through our conscious awareness, most of the time I don’t feel that, when I meet rational people who paranormal experiences, that my first response should be to explain those experiences away. Professor Cotillion’s friendly orbs externalise her own capacity for love, while Peter’s early-morning voice might well be telling him something he needs to take account of. They are both worth something, because God is everywhere, and not absent from these events either.