Matteo looked into the flame. For the first time in his life, he saw not a theological problem, but an answer: We are the gate. We always were.
The flame leaped.
The nun opened her eyes. She smiled at Matteo, then vanished. The priest touched Matteo’s shoulder, whispered a blessing in Coptic, and was gone too. the encyclopedia of religion volume 4 page 165
He stood in a desert at dusk. Before him, a woman in the gray robes of a Buddhist nun knelt opposite a man in the tattered cassock of a Coptic priest. Between them hovered a small, golden flame. Neither spoke. Their eyes were closed, their faces tight with decades of unspoken grief. Matteo looked into the flame
Here is a story based on the archetype of the “guardian of the threshold,” a common religious and mythological motif: The flame leaped