There is a chapter in The Wind in the Willows unlike anything else in the book.
Rat and Mole set out along the river at night in search of a lost child. They hear music. Dawn approaches. And on a small island they encounter something so beautiful, terrible, peaceful, and mysterious that ordinary words seem inadequate.
Kenneth Grahame called the chapter “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.”
Years ago, on his Children’s Hour radio program at WSND at Notre Dame, Fr. Robert Griffin, C.S.C., had another wonderful name for what happens there: “the animals’ God Experience.”
In this episode of The Common Room, we return to Grahame’s extraordinary chapter and ask what Griffin may have seen in it.
Why does Rat hear the music before Mole? Why does their encounter inspire both fear and joy? Why is little Portly found sleeping peacefully at the Piper’s feet? And perhaps strangest of all—why are Rat and Mole allowed to forget what they have seen?
With a little help from Rudolf Otto’s idea of the numinous, we explore a story about creatures encountering a mystery they cannot name: holiness glimpsed through creation, grace before theology, and the strange mercy by which an experience can fade from memory while leaving us changed forever.
There is something especially fitting about encountering this story again through radio.
The music fades.
The broadcast disappears into the air.
Morning comes.
And somehow, something remains.
Come into The Common Room at the little station on Commercial Street in Atchison, Kansas.
Chesterton Radio — Stories • Ideas • Wonder.
