Prayed

Tourists and pilgrims

• Category: Time skin. Read all materials

When the world shuddered in horror, learning about a fire in the Paris Notre Dame, our compatriots were grieved with everyone.

“Since the iron curtain collapsed,” I shared with a comrade, “but the new one had not yet managed to hang, Europe has become much closer to everyone who considers itself part of it.”

“But not that,” he objected, “who calls her“ goropa ”and is jealous of tears spilled on someone else's occasion for them.

Actually, this was the case before. Gogol has already described with loyal disgust the Gothic cathedral with stone chimers: “Frightened perfumes rushed, who got into the windows and doors to fly out as soon as possible, but it wasn’t there: they stayed there, stuck in the doors and windows” (“Viy”).

Since then, a lot has changed with Gogol, who recognized Europe and did not like to leave it, and everyone who opened this small continent again when they began to let it go there. Gradually growing up in one country, Europe has become a common property, collective spiritual real estate, worldwide, and not a French treasure. But back in the twentieth century it was different.

I’m, say, I don’t know what the Germans thought when the Ampir Pavlovsk was smashed, I don’t know what the British thought when they bombed the baroque Dresden, but I guess what the Americans thought about when, instead of Buddhist Kyoto, they threw off the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Then the beauty saved, if not the world, then at least the city that does not justify it, but explains a lot.

Today, before the beautiful, everyone is equal - here "there is neither Elina, nor Judea," nor the Chinese. Having reached their destination, tourists turn into new pilgrims. The old ones knew what they were looking for: healing, including from death. The imperishable relics of the saints hidden in the bowels of the church served as a direct evidence of eternal life. But the current pilgrims are more often looking for not Christian consolation, but ecumenical holiness, generously spilled at all. Stopping on the road, they want not only to see a long -replicated monument, but to feel its magical influence, find out how its powerful presence will act, what it will correct in us and how it will transform thin mental settings - once and for all.

Is this not explaining the tourist boom, which has become an indisputable sign of the 21st century? The desire to join the spiritual, which is famous for all the “sacred stones” of the past, drives us from home, from a summer house and beach - from the ragged to the heated.

I came up with my pseudoscientific theory as a schoolboy when I firmly believed in a purely materialistic picture of the world, bypassing steam and electricity, with the only exception.

“On Earth,” I reasoned, prepared by the Pereshkina textbook, “physical laws act everywhere and the same, but sometimes differently.” In some places, for unknown reasons, an unknown force creates an energy field, having entered into which, we feel the pressure of the sacred.

The sixth feeling helps to detect it. He, as I learned a lot later, can drown out the fighting ideology, as happened with the futurists and communists. The first, believing that beauty interferes with the campaign to the future, offered to fall asleep in Venice’s channels with the ruins of its palaces. The second, having reached the municipal power in the same Venice, wanted to fall asleep the lagoon and hold the Olympic Games in its place. Therefore, as well as for any other reason, to remember Nabokov well. Making fun of Chernyshevsky and his like -minded people, he wrote that they see things in the nominative case, and the world without details. Since there are no such things, nor such a world and cannot be, those who are not burdened with party shoes feel great where they are good, and get there when they can.

To check the theory in practice, instead of then inaccessible, like the moon, Paris went along the Golden Ring and stopped at the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl. Dreaming to meet the temple intimately, we put a tent in view of it. I only remembered the ancient Rus' and the Orthodox faith that I carried out from the film "Andrei Rublev." But knowledge was not part of my plans. The secret does not depend on erudition, it should be extra -mail and hit, like a current in a socket.

That night I got up every hour to examine the temple first under the moon, then under the stars and, finally, in pitch darkness from the rushing cloud, when a vaguely whitening slender block only hinted at her own existence. At dawn, the experiment ended with complete success. Having met the sun in feelings frustrated after a sleepless night, I saw how pale rays painted white walls, and experienced an ecstatic attack of delight, the memory of which warms me so far.

“Reasoning sensibly,” I say today, “we know that the churches were built where the temples of the former faith stood.” Thus, the holiness indifferent to theological nuances accumulates for millennia, forming those energy clots that attract us to themselves, like anomalies, a magnetic arrow.

I know, I hear and apologize, but I warned that all this has nothing to do with science. Another thing is that we all use mysterious energies, knowing nothing about their source, nature, true purpose: for example, a smile.

In Scotland, where Celtic superstitions and the archaic picture of the world were preserved, they do not believe in the isotropic space, which, like Pythagor, pants, which are equal in all directions. In different places things, people and animals behave differently, sometimes terrible.

In the town of Dambarton, where the capital of the Kingdom of British Alt Kliite, led by the leader Keretik, was once located, there is an overtun bridge over a ravine depth of 15 meters. Locals do not dare to cross it when they go for a walk with dogs. On the bridge of the dogs, insurmountable horror covers, and they, breaking off the leash, rush into the abyss. According to well-documented information, so 300 samonian dogs behaved, 50 of them died. This phenomenon was studied from all sides, but scientists did not offer a plausible hypothesis. They only found out that everything on the bridge is all over, and not just dogs, they feel very strange.

“There is nothing strange in this,” the city residents say, “the ravine through which the bridge is thrown is one of the“ thin places ”, where the sky drops to the ground.

Hearing about “thin places”, I was delighted, because he always knew about them, but did not dare to admit that they would not take it for a psycho. In Sedone, no one is afraid of this. In a hot and dusty arizona, where only the explosive snakes and spiders of a black widow lives well, the best of all that I saw in America and the Grand Canyon and the painted desert gathered. But even after them, Sedon is not only impressed by the imagination, but also what is hidden deeper and has no name.

Among the red cliffs to which the wind gave the outlines of the Martian cities destroyed by time (I read about Bradbury about them), the elite lived in luxurious ranch, including Senator Mcakene, Hollywood stars, a dance and successful artists. Those who cannot allow this come here with one, well -known purpose.

Long before the Sedona became the capital of the curly sect New Age, which announced the advance of the new century and compromised it, the local lands were sacred to the Indians. They believed that the spiritual energy that they used, as we were mineral water in the resort, was breaking through the earth. Having adopted this knowledge from the red -skinned ones, the whites made him the property of all those who were eager.

Hurrying up to join, I - already on a gas station - bought a map of the blessed “funnels” (Vortex), for the sake of which pilgrims come here. To the nearest well of Vera, everyone wandered with a goose and silently along a rocky path along a quick, but small stream. The path ended with an island in the middle of the rapids, which was decorated with pebbles made of pebbles, composed of our grateful predecessors. Sitting in a pose, remotely reminiscent of a meditative, I began to wait for the category of spiritual energy - and in vain. Sedon did not give me anything supernatural, but the longer I sat there, the less I wanted to get up. It’s not with the mind (in such cases he rests), but I understood that I was unlikely to find things, more important than the rest that I shared with scarlet cliffs, a talkative river and soaring eagles.

But they, like me, have come to dine. Leaving my stone in a pile of others, I, guessing that I was making a mistake, returned home, looking on the return road to the “metaphysical supermarket” with amulets for the gullible.

I myself, of course, do not believe in charlatans; I know that they are right, and all my life I am looking for “thin places”, where the top is in contact with the bottom, allowing us to stay in the middle.