Light within Light

“The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light. It seems like a metaphor for something. So much does. Ralph Waldo Emerson is excellent on this point.”

“It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great light of existence. Or it seems like poetry within language. Perhaps wisdom within experience. Or marriage within friendship and love. I’ll try to remember to use this. I believe I see a place for it in my thoughts on Hagar and Ishmael. Their time in the wilderness seems like a specific moment of divine Providence within the whole providential regime of Creation.”

-John Ames in Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

…just keep meditating on that a moment.

Paragraphs like these don’t need commentary. They need our focus. Photography seems like it would be a good metaphor for something here. Each sentence in these paragraphs is a light within the radiance of the passage and the passage is a light within the brilliance of the novel. The trouble is that as readers, we often don’t see the beams because we live our lives out of focus. In other words, while glorious light shines off the page (or off a leaf or a painting or a skyscraper for that matter), we are unappreciative because our aperture openings are too small. When a photographer uses a small aperture opening (and a slow shutter speed), limited light enters through the lens and the picture is blurred—unless you have a tripod. We need to open wide our eyes to let the light of each of Robinson’s sentences, your pastor’s sermon, Yahweh’s Word shine into our souls and thus put the whole providential regime of Creation into focus. The bigger our aperature, the more we can see. To quote my favorite source, Wikipedia, for a telescope, “One would want the aperture to be as large as possible, to collect the maximum amount of light from the distant objects being imaged.” Don’t we want to see the universe? Don’t we want to understand our trials as part of God’s redemptive plan from the beginning to the end of time? Don’t we want to also see the details of life as clearly as Sakae Tamura’s camera sees a praying mantis? Don’t we want to focus and meditate on a perfect line break, a precisely placed word of advice, the allegory of marriage or the dirt under your thumbnail?

Well we need one thing: a tripod. The Lord has filled the world with light—so much light that there is light within light—but until Heaven our apertures are very limited. They will never be large enough to allow all that light to pour into our souls. And we will always be a little sluggish as we try to clasp our minds around the displays before us, so we can’t count on a fast shutter speed. That leaves us with one option—we need a tripod. We need a firm foundation. We need Jesus.

And is it not the gospel that we need the Light to focus our souls on the Light, and all the light within that Light?

Broken Bell Jar?

1. "A bell jar is a piece of laboratory glassware in the shape of a bell." -Wikipedia

2. A bell jar "can be sealed, which allows it to be used in a classroom science experiment involving an alarm clock and a vacuum pump. The air is pumped out of the sealed bell jar, and the noise of the alarm clock fades, thus demonstrating that the propagation of sound is mediated by the air. Deprived of its medium, the sound cannot travel." -Wikipedia

3. The Bell Jar--Slyvia Plath's single brilliant novel.

As the main character of Plath's novel, Esther Greenwood, spirals into insanity, she compares her depression to being trapped under a bell jar gasping for breath. "To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream," she mutters. "But I wasn't sure, I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday-at college, in Europe, somwhere, anywhere-the bell jar, with its stiffling distortions, wouldn't descend again?" Esther was dying under her bell jar.

I am very similar to Esther. When I read the novel and Plath's journals, I'm disturbed by the similiarities I share with them. I have no doubt that I would be suffocating in my own bell jar if someone (My Lord Jesus) had not allowed a couple of nails to shatter the glass.

But sometimes I feel like instead of crushing my jar to bits, he just put a big hole on top of it. Sometimes, I don't see that opening and I still operate as if I am trapped in this bell jar, like I am a dead spider glued into a petri dish for some 3rd grader's bug collection so that all can study me from a scientific distance. But then I realize that I am breathing fresh air. I notice that the world is not dead to me nor am I dead to it. Suddenly, I realize that those who are looking at me see more than my genus and species. It is then that I turn and see the blessesd brokenness, that beautiful jagged opening. When this happens, I'm no longer disturbed by the similarities between Esther and me, but deeply grateful for the differences.

It is because my bell jar has been broken that I am starting this blog. See, without that opening, air would not enter and sound would not escape. I have been given the medium that allows sound to travel and so I am going to show my thankfulness for my mediator by letting the noise of my thoughts travel to you.