This story also shows that there is a different rhythm of life in eternal time. One night, a man from our village was coming back home along a road where there were no houses. Cycling along, he heard beautiful music. The music was coming from inside the wall by the sea. He crossed over the wall to find that he was entering a village in this forsaken place. The people there seemed to have expected him. They seemed to know him; and he received a great welcome. He was given drink and delicious food. Their music was more beautiful than he had ever heard before. He spent a few hours of great happiness there. Then he remembered that if he did not return home, they would be out searching for him. He bade farewell to the villagers. When he arrived home, he discovered that he had been missing for a fortnight even though it had seemed like half an hour in the eternal, fairy world.
My father used to tell another such story about a monk named Phoenix, who one day in the monastery was reading his breviary. A bird began to sing, and the monk listened so purely to the song of the bird that he was aware of nothing else. Then the song stopped, and he took up his breviary and went back into the monastery to discover that he no longer recognized anyone there. And they did not recognize him either. He named all his fellow monks with whom he had lived up to what seemed half an hour before, but they had all disappeared. The new monks looked up their annals, and sure enough, years and years before, a monk Phoenix had mysteriously disappeared. At the metaphorical level, this story claims that through real presence the monk Phoenix had actually broken into eternal time. Eternal time moves in a different rhythm from normal, broken human time. Oscar Wilde said, “We think in eternity but we move slowly through time.” This beautiful phrase echoes powerfully because it comes from “De Profundis,” Wilde’s letter of love and forgiveness to one who betrayed and destroyed him.
These Celtic fairy stories suggest a region of the soul that inhabits the eternal. There is an eternal region within us where we are not vulnerable to the ravages of normal time. Shakespeare expressed the ravages of calendar time beautifully in Sonnet 60: