Everyday Spirituality

What ‘spiritual’ festivals do you mark and why?

“There we were,” says Laurie, “all talking with gusto about the present and past problems we’d had with ageing parents…when Mary suddenly announced that the arrangements she’d had to make for her own mother had been relatively easy because she’d been forewarned of the date and time of her mother’s death. Had she been given such news by a doctor or a consultant? Oh no, she told us with a new-found eagerness in her voice, she’d had a personal presentiment, a sudden moment in a dream in which a page of a calendar had appeared beside a ticking clock. The calendar said June 16th. The clock said 4.30. And that was exactly the date and time at which her mother finally expired. It is, I suppose, an ugly testament to the inherent intolerance of rationalists, that the gathering broke up pretty quickly after Mary’s admission.”

But Laurie admits it is beginning to look as though he will have to find some way of playing down his rationalist snobbery. As he finds out on his show from Owen Davies, author of The Haunted: a social history of ghosts, British people are now more inclined than for several centuries to accept the possibility of ‘premonitions and apparitions’.

Of course the doctors and consultants Laurie would have deemed more rational to rely on may have struggled to predict accurately the time of death to within months or years, let alone a day or an hour. Is it not somewhat ‘irrational’ therefore to assume it would have been a doctor who had so accurately predicted Mary’s mother’s demise?

Have you had a premonition? How did it appear? Did you act on it? How did other people react? What would you say to Laurie?

If you want to hear more of Laurie’s (ir)rational reflections on Thinking Allowed subscribe to the podcast.