Two Worlds Fused

Before we get too far from St. Patrick's Day I want to look at the Irish sense that this world and the "other" world are intermingled.  In a talk on Celtic spirituality last week the speaker stressed the closeness of these two worlds.  He showed us a cairn, a short pile of one small stone on another, that he said the Irish used to mark the "thin places" where you could see or feel more strongly presences from the other world. (These cairns are like those used to mark a turn in a hiking trail.)
John O'Donohue in his book Anam Cara says, "The eternal is not elsewhere; it is not distant....The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused."  He uses a Gaelic phrase that means "woven into and through each other."  There is no closed or sealed frontier  between them.  They flow in and out of each other. 
Sometimes when we see a particularly beautiful sight, we have a sense that the Divine is showing through.  A foggy morning like the one in the picture makes me think that I am getting a glimpse of this other world.
"For the Celts," he says, "the eternal world was so  close to the natural world that death was not seen as a terribly destructive or threatening event."  When a person is close to death, the veil between this transient world and the eternal world is very thin.  They may see their friends and relatives who now live in the eternal world coming to meet them, to bring them home.  Death opens us to embrace the Divine that has always lived secretly within us.
Our dead, then, are not in some faraway place.  They are right here with us, even though most of the time we do not see or hear them.  Sometimes we do feel their presence as more than just a memory.