The Secrets of Roan Inish, an old movie which I chanced to see recently, tells a delightful tale of whimsy and fancy.  Rooted in ancient Irish and Welsh mythology, it is the story of a man who meets and marries a selkie.  What's a selkie?  A selkie is a seal, a female seal, who becomes a human being.  However, even though a selkie voluntarily rises out of the water to enter the human experience, she still longs for her original self. If she comes upon her "skin," she immediately dons it and returns to the sea.  She's gone.
     That's what happened to this young man.  One day, as he was out at sea, pursuing his family's traditional fishing trade, his children, of whom he had many, came to their mother as they sit together on the beach, the beach of the island Roan Inish.  "Mother," they say, "why is there a brown jacket stuffed under the roof?"
     The mother, the selkie, realized immediately that this jacket was actually her shed skin.  As all selkies do, she rushed to the house, donned her skin, and returned to the sea. Her husband came home to his wife gone.
     Woven into this plot was another one.  It is the story of a baby who was inadvertently set adrift on the sea and, as legend would have it, drifted to the island, the island of Roan Inish.  Many years later, the descendants of the young man return to Roan Inish and, after some intrigue, find the baby, now a young boy.  They wrap him up and bring him home.
     As they do, we see the seals, the seals out of whom the selkie had come, the seals with whom the boy had grown up, approaching the shore.  In their movements, they seem to say to the boy, "Go with them.  Leave us.  You have found your real home."
     What's my point?  In the selkie becoming human, and in the seals telling the boy to return to his human home, we see a reflection of mystery, the mystery of God, the mystery of humankind.  We see that we humans, and God, drift about our corporate earthly experience, meeting each other, leaving each other, and meeting each other again.  We go away, we come home.  We find, we lose.  We become each other (the incarnation), we become alone (the cross).  We talk, we are silent.
     We share the universe.  And neither of us is alone.