The Celtic tradition had a wonderful sense of the way eternal time is woven through our human time. There is the lovely story of Oisín, who was one of the Fianna, a band of Celtic warriors. He was tempted to visit the land called Tír na n-Óg, which is the land of eternal youth, where the good people, the fairy people, lived. Oisín went off with them, and for a long, long time he lived happily there with his woman, Niamh Cinn Oir, known as Niamh of the golden hair. The time seemed so short to him, being a time of great joy. The quality of our experience always determines the actual rhythm of time. When you are in pain, every moment slows down until it resembles a week. When you are happy and really enjoying your life, time flies. Oisin’s time passed really quickly in the land of Tír na n-Óg. Then his longing for his old life began to gnaw. He began to wonder how the Fianna were, and what was happening in Ireland. He began to long for home, the land of Éire. The fairy people discouraged him because they knew that as a former inhabitant of mortal and linear time, he would be in danger of getting lost there forever. Nevertheless, he decided to return. They gave him a beautiful white horse and told him never to dismount. If he did, he would be lost. He came on the great white horse back to the land of Ireland. Greater loneliness awaited him when he discovered that he had been gone for hundreds and hundreds of years. The Fianna had disappeared. He consoled himself by visiting their old hunting sites and the places where they had feasted, sung, recited old stories, and achieved great feats of valor. In the meantime, Christianity had come to Ireland. When Oisín was riding around on his white horse, he saw a group of men failing as they attempted to raise a big rock to build a church. Being a warrior, he had wonderful strength, and he looked at them and longed to help them; but he knew he dare not dismount from the horse; if he did, he was lost. He watched them from a distance for a while, then he rode nearer. He could not resist any longer. He took his foot out of the stirrup and reached under the rock to raise it up for them, but as soon as he did, the girth broke, the saddle turned over, and Oisín hit the ground. The very moment hé hit the land of Ireland, he became a feeble, wrinkled old man. This is a wonderful story to show the coexistence of the two levels of time. If you broke the threshold that the fairies observed between these two levels of time, you ended up stranded in mortal, linear time. The destination of human time is death. Eternal time is unbroken presence.
ETERNAL TIME
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:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
so do our minutes hasten to their end
each changing place with that which goes before
