I was tired and went to bed early last night. I woke at two and went to the bathroom and then downstairs to make a cup of tea that I brought back to bed. When I had finished drinking I turned out the light preparing to go to sleep when I heard the call of an owl hooting outside, indeed several owls calling, and then just the one owl, and then nothing. Usually our bedroom window is closed at night because otherwise the noise of the traffic stops my wife from sleeping. But she is away and I had left the window open.
“I hear you owl” I replied, feeling a deep sense of connection with something beyond myself, entering into a level of awareness that is not usually open. But as I reflected on it lying in the bed I realised that these moments of heightened awareness although very difficult to describe in words are in fact more common than I had thought.
Making love with a woman has taken me there as has a hug with a friend, a kind word, a piece of music, a line in a poem, simply standing in the midst of the natural world. These moments can come at almost any time and in almost any way. We can put ourselves in places where we have known them to come before and maybe they will come again and maybe they won’t: we have no conscious control over them. If they do come they do so as unexpected, and seemingly undeserved, gifts. Even if the windows are closed and the doors are locked, they may break in and take us by surprise.
I have Christian language that gives me a handle on describing such experiences and no doubt people of other faith traditions have the language to do that too. People without a faith tradition may lack the language but will nevertheless know the experience. It is an experience that touches somewhere very deep within us, it’s impossible to adequately describe or begin to understand it and its easy to dismiss it as fancy, but if we trust it, my experience is that it somehow seems to hold us, support us and even point the way forward.
When I woke at six this morning the experience was still powerful and vivid in my mind and I spent time reflecting on other times when I have known something similar and marinated myself in them as I lay in bed, I wanted to stay there and bask in them, but I also knew that I should get up and try and write this one down before I forgot it, which eventually I did.
I had been away meeting with friends some of whom I have not met face-to-face for many years this week and we shared many moments of such deep connection. I returned very tired which is why I went to bed early only to be awoken by the owl: an unexpected blessing.
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