Sep 14, 2007

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?

2 comments:

David said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
David said...

It often seems to me like most things in this world want us to close our aperture and barely let any light in at all.
It seems better at the moment, but we slowly train our eyes to desire no more than the light of a dimly lit cave.
We must follow the Psalmist in saying "I have calmed and quieted my soul," finding the peace of a baby at its mother's side, or Augustine when he says,
"The house of my soul is, I confess, too narrow for You.
Enlarge it that You may enter."

Letting the noise of my thoughts travel to you.